To buy or to rent?

[JS88]

I'm about to start my nursing program and I was just wondering, is it better to purchase my textbooks or to rent them? Aside from it being cost effective to rent, I was wondering would purchasing it benefit me in anyway (aside from it sitting on my bookshelf, never to be looked at again), such as being useful for the NCLEX or future courses or will those textbooks be useless to me after the class is over? Just want to see what other people did and what their experience is, since it seems like I'm bleeding money left and right at the moment!!

[s.marie333, ASN, RN]

I don't recommend buying previous editions! Nursing (and healthcare in general) is an ever-changing field of knowledge. Nursing books take a very long time to get edited and published, therefore even the new additions have some outdated information in it.

Also, with any type of research for papers, care plans, or assignments in general for nursing school, I would recommend only using sources dated no later than 5 years back.

[AmberHopefulRN]

I'm starting this summer and I plan on buying mine as well. I have been comparing prices between Barnes and Noble, Chegg, textbooks.com, bookbyte.com, Amazon, and half.com. Surprisingly, Barnes and Noble actually has the best prices for most of the books I need and some of them are on the Nook (which I was happy about because I got a Nook for Christmas).

[grandpaj]

Bigwords.com is a really nice site that compiles prices for most used bookstores on the net, including discount coupons available and rental prices. I used it and made an excel spreadsheet every semester with my book list.