Loading Textbook Buy vs Rent…
One row per title on the reading list, priced three ways for the term you need it. Leave a box empty where that option does not exist for that book — an empty box is read as unavailable, never as free.
| Title | Buy | Sells for later | Rent | Digital | Cheapest way |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| no price entered | |||||
| no price entered | |||||
| no price entered |
Give at least one book a buying, renting or digital price. A title on its own cannot be costed.
Not counted anywhere: Book 1, Book 2 and Book 3. A row with no price in it is left out entirely rather than counted as nothing, so the total never quietly gains a free book.
Renting and digital both end. A rental goes back, a licence expires, and neither is on the shelf when you sit a resit or write a dissertation that cites it two years later. Where a book is one you will keep opening, the comparison above is the wrong one to be having, and the cheapest row is only the cheapest way to hold the book until the term ends.
A set text on a reading list can be bought, rented for the term or licensed as a file, and the three prices are usually close enough that no option is obviously right. What separates them is not on the shelf edge at all: it is what the physical copy is worth in June. A book costing eighty and selling on for thirty cost fifty. The same book after a new edition appears cost eighty, and nothing about the purchase in September looked any different.
That is why resale sits in its own column on every row here, as a figure you supply rather than a percentage this page assumes. There is no reliable typical recovery rate for a textbook. It depends on the subject, the edition cycle, whether your institution keeps setting the same text and how patient you are about selling, and any single number covering all of that would be invention dressed as data.
Leave the rental column blank for a title nobody rents and the page records that renting is unavailable for it. It does not read the blank as free, which would recommend renting every book that cannot be rented and would be the most damaging thing this tool could do quietly.
The same applies to the whole row. A title with no prices at all is excluded from every total and named underneath, so the list never gains a book that appears to cost nothing. Where a single strategy is not offered on every title, its total says how many books it covers rather than pretending to describe the full reading list.
Buying with resale in mind is a wager that a second-hand market will still exist for that edition when you are finished with it. So the list is totalled at the resale values you entered, and totalled again with every one of them set to zero, and the gap between the two totals is the size of the wager stated in money.
The second total sometimes changes the decision rather than only the amount. Where a purchase wins purely on the strength of an expected resale, the page names the titles whose cheapest option would flip if nothing sold. That is worth seeing before the order goes in, because the flip costs nothing to plan for in advance and cannot be undone afterwards.
Enter what you would genuinely accept in a hurry at the end of term, not what a copy is currently listed at. Listings are asking prices from people who have not sold yet, and the queue of identical copies appearing the week exams finish is the reason the two figures differ.
Rentals go back and licences expire. Neither is on your shelf for a resit, for a dissertation citing it two years later, or for the module in the following year that assumes you still have it. For a core text in your own subject, the comparison on this page is arguably the wrong one to be running at all, and the cheapest row is only the cheapest way to hold the book until the term ends.
A margin of a pound or two is also not a recommendation. Where two options finish that close the page says the call is tied rather than dressing a coin toss as advice, and the tie-breaker should be whichever form you will actually read — a rented copy you can annotate, or a file you can search at two in the morning.
Leave it empty. Buying is then priced at its full cost, which is the safe direction to be wrong in, and the page tells you which titles it treated that way so the pessimism is visible rather than hidden inside a total.
Only as a title you leave unpriced, which keeps it visible without adding anything. Short-loan copies are rationed hardest in the fortnight before an assessment, so a book you plan to borrow is worth listing even when the answer is that it costs nothing.
Because the resale value differs by title. Renting tends to win where a book barely holds its value, and buying wins where a stable edition sells on for most of what it cost, which is why each row is decided on its own numbers.
Often, but not something this page can judge. Pagination, numbered exercises and chapter ordering shift between editions, and a course setting problems by number is a course where an older printing costs you time instead of money. Ask whoever set the list.