Book Rentals for Menlo Students

At the start of fall classes, students waved goodbye to summer break and prepared for their upcoming semester by purchasing their required textbooks, which can include; Accounting The Financial Chapters for Accounting class, which costs $147 and Horizons for Astronomy class which costs $140. The high costs of some of the required textbooks can cause financial stress and at times panic for them to find a way to afford the textbooks.

"Student and their families are required to pay for their tuition and then on top of that, textbooks that are far too expensive for a college student's budget," said Senior at Menlo College, Carolyn Lee.

With the intent and desire to help students reduce the financial stress of buying textbooks, Charlene Krakowsky, Menlo College's Bookstore manager, established an online book rental program. The program allows students to rent their textbooks that would originally cost more than $140.

Krakowsky's online book rental system was first offered to Menlo students last year after five years of consideration and research. Krakowsky spent much of her time looking into the various options for a book rental program. She visited several other colleges where she was able to learn about their different processes, the paperwork involved, and end results.

When Krakowsky presented a book rental program to Menlo Administration five years ago, it was not an online rental program. That meant rentals   would have had to be done physically through the Menlo College Bookstore. The Administration chose not to establish the program because of the increase of work it would cause to the business office and to Krakowsky's already full workload.

Nearly five years later, Krakowsky was able to establish a book rental program by working with Menlo's textbook distribution company. The company believes, like many people, that the future of books is moving online. After years of effort by Krakowsky, her goal of providing a book rental system for students was accomplished with the online book rental system in place today.

Approximately 2,200 college stores offered textbook rental programs of some kind this past fall, which dramatically rose from the 300 college stores in the fall 2009. Renting a textbook can save a student between 33 and 55 percent of what they would have originally paid.

"Less people are renting books this semester at Menlo than last year, possibly because they want to sell it back for the money," said Krakowsky.  Also Menlo students may not be aware of the newly established program and how renting textbooks can alleviate a significant amount of student's total costs when obtaining their most expensive textbooks.

If students are curious about what books are available to rent, they can visit the Menlo College Bookstore's website www.menlo.bkstr.com where there is a direct link to the online ordering page. They can also visit the Menlo Bookstore where the textbooks for sale have information posted near the textbook providing the title, price and a highlighted letter ‘r' if they are available to rent. Krakowsky is working on becoming a book depot, which would allow those who rented their textbooks for the full semester to drop off their rented books to her directly instead of having to mail it back.

At this time, students with book loans are not eligible to rent their books, but that is something Krakowsky is working on changing in the future. To rent a textbook or find out more information about the Menlo College Bookstore, check out their website at www.menlo.bkstr.com.