textbooks Archives - Poorer Than You

You may feel funny getting the student in your life something as totally lame as textbooks for a gift. But if they’re cash-strapped like I was over the course of my education, it may end up being the gift they appreciate most this season. It feels like a big weight has been lifted when you go to buy textbooks knowing that the price of them is already taken care of.

How to Give Textbooks as a Gift

Logistically, this gets a little tricky. There are a couple ways you could do it:

Give the student a handwritten (and signed!) IOU for one term’s textbooks. Put instructions on it that the student must email or give you a complete and accurate list of the textbooks they need as soon as possible. Once you have the textbook list, you can go ahead and purchase the books through your preferred textbook retailers, or hit up some of the ones in my textbook buying guide.
Send the student a gift certificate to Chegg so that they can purchase or rent their textbooks from there. Chegg is my personal favorite textbook service, and I rented at least one textbook from them every term since their debut.
For more flexibility, go with a gift certificate to Amazon and write out that it’s for textbooks… or anything else the student might want or need.
I guess you could also go out, buy some random textbooks, gift wrap them, and hope for the best. I meant, who doesn’t love getting a pile of heavy books that may or may not be relevant to your classes?

And don’t feel like the lame friend or relative for giving textbooks instead of something fun. The fun gifts they may receive from other people will be more enjoyable without the cost of textbooks hanging over their head. Trust me.

*Disclosurery stuff: I have affiliate relationships with Chegg and Amazon. I don’t know if I get an sort of commission for gift certificates sold through Chegg, but the link does include a coupon code embedded in it, so it’s win-win. I receive a 6% commission for Amazon gift certificates. As with all of my affiliate relationships, I recommend these sites wholeheartedly with or without commission.

I’ve been a long time fan of Chegg. In fact, for a little while, I was even running the Chegg blog. It’s a great service that lets you rent your textbooks, which can save you a nice chunk of change over buying a book, especially when you don’t really want to keep the book afterward. Because of my longstanding relationship with Chegg, they contacted me a few weeks ago to see if I’d like to try their newest product: text-a-licious textbooks.

Usually I’m not one to turn down free stuff, but I felt I should, since I’ve graduated and no longer need any textbooks. “No problem!” my buddies at Chegg said, “You can try it anyway. I’m sure you’ll find our new product very tasteful.”

The italics really creeped me out, but I surfed the site and picked out a textbook I thought I might want to read. A nice American history textbook seemed like a good idea, so I let Chegg know and they sent my text-a-licious copy of the book to me right away.

When I opened the package, I could smell the book right away – Apricot American History flavored! As much as I loved the idea, I was still skeptical – would I be able to read the whole book? Actually, it worked out quite well! I learned a lot, and I didn’t have to pay extra for tasty snacks!

I can see where this would really save you money in class. At my school, people were always getting up during the class breaks to go visit the vending machine. Who wants to go stand in line to pay for overpriced stale junk food? If you had a text-a-licious book with you, you could just enjoy your class material!