McGraw-Hill Education and Chegg.com Partner to Create Innovative Shared-Revenue Model for Textbook Rentals

McGraw-Hill Education, the premier education partner for schools nationwide, and Chegg.com, the leading online textbook rental company, today announced the launch of a pilot shared-revenue program in which McGraw-Hill will provide new print textbooks directly to Chegg for its online rental business. This first-of-its-kind collaboration will provide McGraw-Hill with a new revenue stream and allow Chegg to expand the supply of textbooks that students can rent from its service.

Traditionally, McGraw-Hill has received payment only for the initial purchase of a textbook by a distributor or bookstore. These channel partners typically resold the products to students and bought them back at the end of the semester to resell again. Under this agreement, McGraw-Hill will share in the rental revenues throughout the life of each McGraw-Hill title in the pilot program.

"We are pleased to enter into this innovative collaboration with Chegg, which creates an entirely new revenue source for the company and marks our entrance into the growing textbook rental market -- a model we plan to build upon through other channels, including bookstores," said Ed Stanford, president, McGraw-Hill Higher Education. "This partnership strengthens our commitment to providing students with the widest variety of options to obtain the high-quality educational materials they need to drive academic achievement and personal and professional development."

"At Chegg we not only want to help students realize significant savings by renting their textbooks, but we also want to give them immediate access to every textbook title that they need," said Jim Safka, chief executive officer, Chegg.com. "So it made perfect sense for us to collaborate with McGraw-Hill on a shared revenue program, furthering our mission of offering students the lowest price, most eco-friendly solution for college textbooks."

Online textbook rentals have been growing in popularity for years, and certain McGraw-Hill titles have been available through Chegg's online textbook rental service since Chegg began nationwide operations in 2007. This agreement creates a first-ever direct working relationship between a publisher and textbook rental company, wherein Chegg will source all of its rental inventory directly from McGraw-Hill. The agreement also creates a rental-revenue-sharing pilot covering a series of 25 McGraw-Hill Higher Education titles available for rental on http://www.chegg.com/.

For each of the 25 titles selected for the revenue-sharing pilot, McGraw-Hill and Chegg will share the revenue received on each rental throughout the life of the textbook. Textbooks are often rented five or more times before they are retired, and, according to Chegg, the rental life of a textbook is often longer than the life of the published edition. The purpose of the pilot program is to establish the economics of renting textbooks in a live-market test. The 2009-2010 school year will be used to determine the success of the pilot program and the value of an expanded partnership and revenue-sharing model between McGraw-Hill Education and Chegg.

About McGraw-Hill Higher Education

McGraw-Hill Higher Education is a premier provider of teaching and learning solutions for the post-secondary and higher education markets -- preparing students worldwide to meet the increasing challenges of the 21st century knowledge economy. It is a division of McGraw-Hill Education, a leading global provider of instructional, assessment and reference solutions that empower professionals and students of all ages. McGraw-Hill Education has offices in 33 countries and publishes in more than 65 languages. Additional information is available at http://www.mhhe.com/.

About Chegg.com

Chegg is replacing the legacy textbook channel with an Internet-based model for rental and return. Started in 2005 by Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra, and launched nationally in 2007, Chegg has already saved students at over 6,000 colleges millions of dollars. With a growing inventory of more than 2.4 million books, Chegg.com puts textbooks into the hands of students when they need them, arriving in the brand's iconic orange box, and enables students to send their books back - with a streamlined, elegant solution. Additionally, Chegg has partnered with American Forests Global ReLeaf Program to plant a tree for every book rented; to date, more than 850 acres - the equivalent of 150 city blocks - have been planted. For more on Chegg, visit http://www.chegg.com/.

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SOURCE: McGraw-Hill Education; Chegg.com

CONTACT: Tom Stanton, McGraw-Hill Education, +1-212-904-3214,
tom_stanton@mcgraw-hill.com, or Tina Couch, Chegg, +1-408-855-4471,
tina@chegg.com

Web Site: http://www.mhhe.com/