Here at Eastern we are fortunate enough to have the bonus of renting our textbooks rather than buying them.

This is a huge bonus for students as most schools require them to purchase their textbooks; and let’s be honest, many professors do not even use the textbooks their students have in their curriculum.

Recently, Eastern has been discussing the fact that some of the textbook publishers are now going digital, which would require the university to purchase a subscription each year for each digital textbook.

The problem is that with the university purchasing digital subscriptions each year for textbooks, this would most likely cause tuition to raise as a way to fund this money.

We at The Daily Eastern News strongly oppose the idea of digital textbooks.

We feel that the Textbook Rental service at Eastern is convenient for students, and we are grateful to have this privilege to rent books when most schools do not offer this option to their students.

As previously stated, most students get their textbooks at the beginning of semesters, and then they find out from their professors that they won’t even be using their textbooks.

What is the point of having them if you are not going to use them?

At Eastern, we can easily return to Textbook Rental and drop off the books we are not going to be using.

This takes a huge weight off our shoulders, literally, by not having to carry so many books in our backpacks, especially ones we do not need.

Granted, if we had digital textbooks we would not necessarily have to carry them, as we would not have physical copies, but how do you suppose the university would fund the costs of purchasing subscriptions to digital textbooks every year?

We feel that this would cause tuition to rise and with tuition being more expensive than it already is, this could be considered a turn-off to projected students and could cause enrollment to drop.

We fully understand that today, things are going digital, but we feel that textbooks do not necessarily have to be digital.

We enjoy having the option to rent our textbooks and not have to buy one that we may never use.

Let’s face it. One class may require a student to have multiple textbooks, and what is the point of having them if we do not need them?

We strongly feel that avoiding the digital route of textbooks would save the university plenty of money as well as students, and it would be a better option for us all.

Renting is more affordable and convenient.