Student discount: how to save money on your university course textbooks So what are the alternatives to splashing out on that first-year tome you'll probably never use again after you graduate? University libraries - generally free to borrow from unless you return your loans unduly late - are perfect for obscure weekly reading list items. But as anyone who has scrapped over the last copy of that core text the night before an essay deadline will attest, they are unlikely to stock enough copies of the most essential reading to keep everyone happy. And with dwindling budgets, this " high value, low volume" focus looks set to remain. Another option is to sell and indeed buy in the second-hand market. This has much to recommend it - cheaper, greener and you don't need to worry about folding the page corners. Obvious downsides are that course reading requirements do change over time, and you'll be stuck with someone else's doodles. One growing alternative is to buy or rent textbooks online. CourseSmart, a new publisher-owned initiative set up to help students and universities access course materials on their digital devices, launched in North America in 2006. It currently has 3.3 million student and staff users, and launched in the UK last month. Last month it asked the NUS to carry out a survey of UK students" electronic habits. The results showed that 63 per cent already use electronic gadgets for academic reading. Ninety-nine per cent own laptops, and a rapidly growing 31 per cent have shiny new iPads and other tablets. Amazon has also launched an electronic textbook rental service for its Kindle device, although currently only in the US. So could this really be the start of a digital textbook revolution? "In the consumer world we don't expect to ever reach 100 per cent digital - there will always be some people who love the physicality," says Fionnuala Duggan, Managing Director of CourseSmart. But as digital becomes better and better, there will come a point where it is impossible for students to prefer physical - we will see more interaction, more multimedia, video and integration with homework tasks, which will make learning from a physical book simply impractical. Not all agree. Mehdi Maghsoodnia of BookRenter.com, which specialises in renting physical textbooks, told a newspaper earlier this year that 99 per cent of the educational market still use physical texts. " To help students, you have to lower the cost of textbooks," he said. And at present renting a book for a year may be 50 per cent cheaper, but if you want to reference it again later in your degree you may end up out of pocket. But not for long, according to David Ball, University Librarian at Bournemouth University: The printed book, in terms of undergraduate use, definitely won't be around for long. Would you study using only electronic textbooks? More in the Telegraph's Student Finance section: Student finance: how to manage your student finances, from bank accounts to online discounts Student finance: planning ahead for university Student finance: Plan now for future gains Student Finance England's guide to starting university Follow Telegraph Education on Twitter: @tele_education