For the first time in her three years of college, Kelsey Boyd can walk into her campus bookstore with a smile on her face.
She watches her fellow students scramble around frantically looking for the new, updated editions of their textbooks. Last year, Introduction to Psychology cost $120. This year, it’s priced at $190.
“For just something like seven additional pages,” Boyd said. “They obviously never heard of Chegg Textbook Rental.”
Chegg Textbook Rental is the new wave rippling through college campuses. It boasts a catalogue of a million books.
Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra started the company in 2005 to allow students at Iowa State University to list their textbooks for resale. It was the Craigslist of college textbook world.
The company has since grown to serve students at colleges and universities across the country. Students who rent from Chegg can save anywhere from 65 percent to 85 percent on the price of the book. According to Phumbhra, last year alone, Chegg customers saved $60 million.
Phumbhra saw great potential in Chegg from the very beginning. “We started Chegg as a sort of Craigslist for college students,” Phumbhra said. “Then we began to see that students are more interested in exchanging and selling books to each other.”
That gave Phumbhra and Rashid the idea to come up with something revolutionary that would save money on textbooks and allow students to rent and sell their books to earn money. In 2007, Chegg went national.
So, How does Chegg work?
It’s as simple as renting a movie through Netflix. It’s so similar to the Netflix rental method, that Chegg’s founders originally named the company Textbookflix.com. They later renamed the company Chegg to make it easier to remember. It’s a combination of the words “chicken” and “egg.”
“We wanted a name that was fun and that people would remember easily,” Phumbhra said.
“In school, all of us discuss the question of ‘what came first, the chicken or the egg?’ We wanted to say that Chegg is number one in textbook rentals. So to answer the question, we came first.”
To rent books, students go online to Chegg’s Web site and create a free account. Once that is established, students search for their books by entering the title, author, ISBN number or key word of the textbook.
Chegg’s owners promise all their books to be in usable condition. Rental fees vary by books and are paid online. Book orders come with a prepaid envelope to return them when done with use.
In addition to the convenience of renting textbooks from their dorm rooms, students can also save hundreds of dollars.
“With Chegg, we are more concerned with students saving money than us making money,” Phumbhra said. “We understand how much buying textbooks cost. When you buy books, only the publishers make money.”
Abigail Morgan, a junior at Howard University, is considering ordering her books from Chegg next semester.
“I don’t know a lot of people at Howard who rent their textbooks,” Morgan said. She said since learning about Chegg, she would consider using the company next semester.
If saving money is not a big enough incentive to rent from Chegg, the fact that they are environmentally conscious could be. For every book that students rent, sell or even donate,
Chegg plants one tree. Last year, Chegg planted 700 acres worth of trees. That is equivalent to 175 city blocks.
Boyd has been a faithful customer of Chegg since she discovered how simple it was.
“My mom told me about Chegg at the beginning of this school year,” said Boyd, a junior at the College of Charleston. “I have been using Chegg ever since and I love it. I have saved hundreds of dollars on books and I no longer have to worry about buying a $100 book from the campus bookstore and only getting $20 in return when I attempt to sell it back.”
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