Are libraries your best bet for textbooks? Turns out, maybe not.
Borrowing textbooks from the library sounds like a good idea. With all of the talk (from me included) about the high cost of textbooks, borrowing has been heralded as a smart and free alternative. It’s part of the reason CampusBooks added the ability to search library inventories to our mobile app last year: if students can get a book for free, by all means, they should.
But that theory only works if the library actually has your book, and doing a little digging showed that often times, unfortunately, that’s not the case.
I called around to some libraries near major colleges, both on and off campus, to see whether the advice to borrow, not buy, was sound. Unfortunately, more often than not, the response came back negative.