When it comes to the quickly growing online textbook-rental market, Chegg is the young giant to beat. But its smaller competitor, Bookrenter, is making some impressive gains. If you look at traffic to each respective website, you can see spikes at the beginning of each semester (see chart above).
Last January, Bookrenter’s traffic was only 12.6 percent of Chegg’s, whereas by the August peak, it was 32.5 percent. From peak to peak, Bookrenter’s traffic grew 167 percent to 446,000 unique monthly U.S. visitors, according to comScore. Chegg’s August traffic, however, was about the same as during the January peak: 1.3 million. The chart below, supplied by Bookrenter, shows how Bookrenter’s traffic has been growing as a percentage of Chegg’s. In October it was 58 percent, but that number is not as meaningful as the percentage during the peak rental months earlier in the semester.
We do know there is a direct correlation between traffic and sales, however, it is not clear from these numbers how many books on average each student rented. Bookrenter CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia says he shipped about 500,000 books in the Fall semester. If you figure each book rents for an average of roughly $50, that means Bookrenter did $25 million in sales last semester. That was the semester Bookrenter went into hypergrowth. Add another 125,000 books shipped in the Spring semester, and it looks like Bookrenter will do a little more than $30 million in revenues this year based on my back-of-the-envelope math. Chegg is expected to hit about $130 million in revenues this year. Bookrenter still has a long way to go to catch up, but it also didn’t raise over $200 million in venture capital, it only raised $20 million.
Much of Bookrenter’s growth is being fueled by its partnerships with college book stores. Since partnering with campus bookstores last March, Bookrenter is now the official book rental platform for 515 college bookstores in the U.S. serving 6 million students, or 31 percent of the college population. There are between 6,000 and 7,000 college bookstores nationwide. Oh, and Bookrenter is now invading Canada as well.
BookRenter launched the first online textbook rental site in 2006 and remains the fastest growing service. Dedicated to making education more affordable by allowing students to rent textbooks for up to 80% off the retail price. BookRenter’s innovative pricing and operating systems provide students with the best price, highest quality books, and most flexible rental experience available today. Currently carrying over 5.5 million titles and serving thousands of students on over 5,000 U.S. campuses, BookRenter is one of the...
Chegg, an online textbook rental company, was inspired by Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra’s frustration with the policies and procedures of their own university’s bookstore. Osman and Aayush knew there had to be a better solution, one that worked for students, professors and publishers alike. Chegg was launched at Iowa State University in 2005 as a hyper-local classifieds directory. In fall 2007, Chegg introduced their revolutionary textbook rental service. Chegg now offers its services to more than 6,400 universities and...
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