Barnes & Noble College Booksellers launches textbook rental service

NEW YORK Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, announced that it has created a multichannel textbook rental program for college students. According to the company, Barnes & Noble College is the first nationwide bookseller to offer a multichannel program.

At the beginning of the 2009 fall semester, Barnes & Noble College said it was test piloting the rental program in three of its 636 campus bookstores. Since then, the program has expanded to 25 of their campus bookstores including The Ohio State University, The University of Maryland, Borough of Manhattan Community College and University of South Carolina.

The rental program enables students to rent textbooks by logging into their campus bookstore’s e-commerce site. They can also rent from their campus Barnes & Noble bookstore.

“We’ve had a tremendous response from students and faculty to our rental program and as a result have continued to expand it to other colleges and universities across the country,” said Max Roberts, president of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. “What makes our program so unique is that we’ve made saving on textbooks even easier for students by providing them the option of ordering their rentals online and having them shipped or picked up at their campus bookstore.”