E-Books

New Model Lets Students Rent Textbooks on Pay-as-You-Go Basis

• By Michael Hart
• 04/12/16

A new service allows college students to rent digital textbooks only for the time they need them, perhaps the first pay-as-you-go model for college materials.

Once students register with iFlipd, they can rent digital textbooks for as little as a week. Once they finish using a book, they can move it back into the digital catalogue, making it available to other students. There is a loyalty program that gives points toward free rentals.

iFlipd is also integrated with Datalogics and its interactive Active Textbook e-book system so that students have sharing capabilities. They can share notes on the texts through the platform and access notes made by previous users of the same textbooks. The note-sharing platform allows for highlighting, annotations, audio, video and search.

New users can receive a free one-week rental when they sign up. iFlipd representatives said the cost of college textbooks has increased tenfold over the past 30 years and now students spend an average of $1,200 each year.

"It's no secret that the cost of textbooks can be a huge financial burden for students everywhere," said iFlipd CEO and founder Kati Radziwon. "iFlipd offers an alternative solution providing students greater financial flexibility than semester-long rentals. Our pay-as-you-go model allows students to rent textbooks as needed, and only pay for the time they use them. Students can read books on any device while saving hundreds of dollars per year."