The high cost of college textbooks remains one of the major student problems and a significant expense alongside tuition and accommodation. With prices of some new textbook copies reaching several hundred dollars, not every student is capable of affording them.

Today, we’ve decided to look closer at how the textbook industry works and try to understand why textbook costs are so high and how they influence student life and decisions. And more importantly, we wanted to show how to leverage more affordable options like buying used books or renting textbooks (of course, with the discontinuation of Amazon rent textbooks program, many students will have to adapt and look for other rental alternatives).

Basically, we’ve collected the most actual public data on the subject available today and compiled it into one neat infographic. We’ve collected the most relevant data for 2020–2022 that we could access; thus, you can see the latest numbers on the infographics.

Right-click on the image to get the embed code.

At BookScouter, we do our best to make student life easier by helping them find textbooks at more affordable prices. With this infographic, we also aimed to show that there are other options to bring the cost, of course, materials within reach: there are used books, rentals, and eBooks — all of which can be found on BookScouter. With us, you can get the textbooks for the next semester without having to pay a hefty sum. Instead, you can use our platform to find the best offers from 20+booksellers.