If you're going to spend a couple hundred dollars on a nonperishable item, you want to make sure it's going to last more than a few months. Sadly, college textbooks don't fit the bill.  

Think about it: You only use a particular textbook for one class, one semester. All your textbooks for all your classes don't just weigh a lot; they cost a lot, too. According to the College Board, students spend about $1,000 on textbooks each year. Textbook prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, and a new edition (published every three years) costs about 12 percent more than its predecessor.

Rather than paying retail for a brand new textbook or even scoring a deal on a used book, enterprising students are taking advantage of some clever alternatives to traditional book-buying. Check 'em out.

Rent Textbooks
Why buy when you can rent? Unlike houses, the value of textbooks does not increase over time - giving you all the more reason to take a short-term approach to your required reading. Sites like Chegg and BookRenter.com make this a possibility.

At Chegg, you can rent textbooks for 60 days, a quarter, or a full semester. At BookRenter.com, choose from 30-day, 45-day, 60-day, 90-day, and 125-day rental options. Just take care of the books so you don't incur fees for damage. Bonus: Chegg promises to plant a tree for every book you rent, sell, or buy - making textbook renting a win-win situation for you and the rest of the green world.

Keep in mind that you don't necessarily have to go online to rent textbooks: check with your college bookstore to see if it offers this money-saving option.

Swap Textbooks
Your days of trading tuna fish sandwiches for PB&J may be past, but swapping stuff with friends never gets old. Now you can take the trend a step further by trading your textbooks.

Sites like Fast Book Swap  and StudentBookSearch help local college students find each other and trade textbooks. Other sites like Textbook Revolt, Bookins, and Swaptree allow you to swap with bookhunters nationwide, so you all pay is the price of shipping.  

The potential downside to textbook swapping is that books are only available if someone lists them for trade. So be prepared to exercise more patience and perseverance in waiting for someone to post the book you're looking for.

Buy Digital Textbooks
We are living in a digital world, and we are digital girls ... and boys. And when you go textbook digital, you can save a ton of green - trees and money.

Digital textbooks offer search, highlighting, and note-taking capabilities; you can even read e-books on your iPhone. How's that for progressive? CourseSmart offers a huge selection of digital books at low prices: the site reports student savings of about $60 per book. eCampus.com is another site that offers savings of more than 50 percent per e-book.

If you're especially lucky, your prof will assign a Flat World book for your course. These e-books are free; you only pay to download or print.

Don't pay full price when you can go deep discount. Deals are available in the college textbook marketplace - you just have to use ingenuity to find them.

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