Textbook Rental Market Heats Up: BookRenter Raises $6M Series A
November 23, 2009 at 01:52 AM EST
Earlier this month college textbook rental company Chegg raised a total $112M combined as part of a Series D and debt, bringing the total raised by the company to date to a massive $144M. Competitor BookRenter will tomorrow announce a Series A round of $6M, raised from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management. BookRenter has only raised a fraction of the capital of their competitor Chegg , but the company claims that it is growing at over 300 percent, year-over-year. The companies are loading their war-chests to fight over a fiercely competitive college textbook rental market. Both Chegg and BookRenter work on a similar principal - students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. Textbooks are expensive, and often have a limited lifespan - these attributes, combined with a market of poor students looking to save a few dollars, have resulted in the textbook rental market exploding in recent years.