DALLAS — You can rent an apart­ment, a car or a DVD. Now add col­lege text­books to the list expen­sive items that peo­ple are rent­ing because they are short on cash or look­ing for a bet­ter deal.

Students at the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of North Texas can lease some text­books through their cam­pus book­store, while oth­ers can find deals through a grow­ing num­ber of online rental sites _ think Netflix for English lit and calculus.

Meanwhile, a few pro­fes­sors and col­leges are exper­i­ment­ing with free online textbooks.

There’s good rea­son for the demand. College stu­dents can expect to shell out more than $1,000 on text­books over the aca­d­e­mic year, accord­ing to the Southern Regional Education Board. While that’s still a frac­tion of tuition and fees, the high cost prompts plenty of gripes.

“It comes to a point where you feel like you have to take out a sep­a­rate loan just for your text­books,” said Branden Scott, a sopho­more at UNT.

Scott rented a $70 text­book for his English class through UNT’s book­store. The price for a semester-long rental: about $25.

“I was in a rush to get my text­books for the cheap­est prices I could,” he said.

UNT and UTA were among seven col­leges nation­ally to offer text­book rentals this fall through their book­stores, which are man­aged by Follett Higher Education Group. This month, the pro­gram will expand to 22 col­leges across the country.

In gen­eral, a $100 new text­book rents for $42.50 per semes­ter. Students must be at least 18, pro­vide a credit card and sign a con­tract agree­ing to return the mate­ri­als on time. Otherwise, they’re charged 75 per­cent of the new book price, plus a 7.5 per­cent pro­cess­ing fee. Users can high­light and write in the books, but they must be returned in good condition.

At UTA, just over 4,000 stu­dents rented more than 6,000 books this fall, said Bill Coulter, the cam­pus book­store man­ager. “It went well. Everybody’s happy with it,” he said.

Internet star­tups are jump­ing on the rental band­wagon, too. A California-based com­pany called Chegg lets stu­dents order text­books online and then ships via UPS. The four-year-old com­pany has rented more than 1.5 mil­lion text­books this year.

So many sites have popped up it’s hard to keep them straight: bookrenter​.com, cam pus​bookrentals​.com and text​bookrentals​.com.

Not every text­book can be rented. Experts say books need to have a decent shelf life so they can be rented sev­eral times. A book­store won’t recoup its costs if the fourth edi­tion of a book is quickly replaced by the fifth. A 2005 fed­eral study reported that pub­lish­ers revise text­books every three or four years.

Nor does rent­ing always make sense. Students who need their books beyond one semes­ter class are bet­ter off buy­ing. If a stu­dent needs a book imme­di­ately, wait­ing for books from Amazon​.com and half​.com might not be possible.

Consumer advo­cates say text­book rental pro­grams help by offer­ing more choices. But it shouldn’t stop there.

“We think that open-source text­books are the ulti­mate solu­tion,” said Nicole Allen, text­book advo­cate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups, a coali­tion of stu­dent con­sumer organizations.

Allen cited a com­pany called Flat World Knowledge, which pub­lishes about a dozen busi­ness e-textbooks, with more titles in the works. Students can read the books online for free or buy a printed ver­sion (rang­ing from about $20 for a print-it-yourself copy to $60 for a soft-cover color copy).

At Cedar Valley College in Lancaster, Texas, stu­dents tak­ing Introduction to Business all use the same e-text from Flat World. Professor Diane Minger said she likes the book, and not just because it’s easy on stu­dents’ checkbooks.

“I found the book to be extremely thor­ough, cov­er­ing mate­r­ial in much greater depth and detail than cur­rent books on the mar­ket,” she said. “So far, I’m get­ting good com­ments from students.”

Still, experts say don’t expect e-books to replace printed books any time soon. Even though young peo­ple today are more likely to down­load music rather than buy a CD, or to get their news online, StudentPIRGS found that most would still rather buy a low-cost text­book than read one free online.

Scott, the UNT sopho­more, said he’d actu­ally pre­fer dig­i­tal text­books. “I don’t think a lot of stu­dents in this day really do care whether or not it’s phys­i­cally in print or if you just have to access a Web site,” he said. “Both are just as convenient.”

And while he had a good expe­ri­ence rent­ing, Scott found one major downside.

“I’m a lit­tle sad I have to return it, because I enjoyed a lot of the sto­ries in it.”