Just in case annual college tuition isn’t burning a big enough hole in your wallet, there’s also the seemingly endless list of extra expenses. Room, board, and books can add thousands of dollars to the bill each semester. However, Chegg may just be the answer to your problems.

Chegg, a start-up company based in Silicon Valley, found success by renting textbooks. That’s right- renting textbooks to college students. Company co-founders Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbra got the idea for this business after their first company, CheggPost flopped. The first website was meant to be a clone of CraigsList, but strictly for college student needs. This company gained some traction in a few campuses, but did not take off. In reviewing the website traffic, the founders saw that most of the viewers were college students looking for cheap textbooks.

The textbooks offered on Chegg are up to 80% off what you will find anywhere else. As the company prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, sales are growing rapidly. Chegg’srevenue for 2008 was more than $10 million. Sounds like a lot, until you hear that so far this year, the company has surpassed that amount in the month of January alone.

Due to the high “demand for good deals on textbooks running high, Chegg’s success comes in large part from being able to address those inefficiencies,” according to a recent New York Times article. “While Chegg primarily rents books, it is also essentially acting as a kind of “market maker,” gathering books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one.”

The savings vary, depending on the book you are looking for. For example, a macroeconomics textbook that retails for $122 was found for $65 on Chegg. Also, for one semester, an organic chemistry book retailing for $123 was offered for $33. Shipping adds a small price to each book, but Chegg offers a free print-label on their website so that you can ship the book back after the semester cost-free.

Hey, if you can rent movies, why not rent textbooks! This is going to be a great way to save some of that cash you shell out each semester.