Winter quarter starts this week, which means rain-soaked bike seats, new courses and sticker shock as students line up to buy the quarter’s expensive textbooks.

Thrifty students now have a new way to get those textbooks: They can opt to rent books instead of buying them.

The Web site Chegg.com was launched this summer as a Netflix-like textbook-rental company. Students pay some fraction of the cost of a new textbook and can keep the book until the end of the term. A similar service is offered by Bookrenter.com.

Stanford students taking the Biology or Human Biology cores will need the eighth edition of “Life: the Science of Biology.” A new copy costs $159.75 from the Stanford Bookstore or $98.57 from Amazon.com. Renting the book from Chegg will set a student back $52 for the quarter.

Aayush Phumbrha, co-founder and vice-president of Chegg, said the Web site has really taken off.

“We had six times the numbers we were expecting,” Phumbrha said. “This semester, the only time I stepped out and had some fun was on New Year’s Eve because I was spending every day processing orders.”

Mariel Bailey ‘08 said she usually buys her textbooks used from Amazon.com marketplace, but she would consider renting her textbooks because she rarely hangs on to them after her classes are over.

“I keep my books until the end of the year and then I sell them back to the Bookstore,” she explained, expressing frustration with the small amount of money that she sometimes gets back.

“One time they offered me 50 cents for a book,” she said.

Jessie Gardner ‘08 also expressed frustration with the bookstore’s buyback policy.

“They usually only buy one fifth of the books I have and they give me at most 20 percent of what I paid for them,” she said.

Gardner said she usually keeps only one or two textbooks each year and sells the rest back to the Stanford Bookstore. But she said she would not want to rent her books online because she does not like waiting for needed texts to arrive in the mail. Even if she were willing to get books online, she said re-selling the books would save her more money than renting them.

“I could buy a used book online and then re-sell it online for almost the same price,” she said.

Christine Feigal ‘08 was also hesitant to rent her books online.

“You have more liberty when you own a book,” she said, explaining that she likes to take notes in her textbooks.

Chegg allows limited highlighting in its textbooks but does not allow writing.

Like Gardner, Feigal said she could save more money by re-selling her textbooks rather than renting them. She said she has resold textbooks for $5 less than what she paid for them.

“I sell them to freshmen,” she explained.

Though different purchasing methods exist, it is evident that most students are looking for a way to save money on textbooks. Phumbrha hopes the online textbook rental business can help.

“We should give students what they want,” he said.