College costs add up to a lot more than the tuition listed on the flashy brochure. Unfortunately, most students find out the hard way the large amount of added costs that accompany the opportunity to attend college. They have to pay for everything from laundry to insurance, from lab usage fees to textbooks. Actually the money charged for textbooks forms a significant chunk of change for each semester of school. Textbook publishers sell books targeted to specific classes with only so much demand, and so they justify charging exorbitant prices. You may enter a great college chemistry program and find that his books each cost well over $100. The school bookstore may seem to be ripping a hole out of your wallet with the incredibly high prices charged for books. But with a little ingenuity, you can find incredible bargains on both old and new books.
Pricey College Textbooks Draining Your Wallet Dry?
First of all, use the technology available to you. Take advantage of the internet and the many incredible bargains offered by various shopping sites. Check out Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Half, A1 Books, and other booksellers. Search Google Product Search to find the cheapest bargain on a book. Your local college in a small town may not have the largest selection of used bargains in its bookstore, but you can find bargains from all over the nation online. When searching, remember to search by the ISBN number of your book to be sure you are getting the right edition. Textbooks change editions frequently, and teachers generally like to keep up with the latest editions. It’s easy to pick up a used copy of a book and then find out you can’t even use it for a class because it’s outdated and the teacher has rewritten quizzes and tests around the content of the new book. However, some new editions offer only minor changes, and teachers may be willing to let you use an older one. Be sure to check with your teachers if you think you can get a great bargain on an old book.
If you know people in the same major as you who may have already taken certain classes, check with them to see if they would be willing to let you buy, rent or borrow a copy of the textbook. Someone studying history in a large university can find many other history majors who have taken the classes he’s wanting to take and get a bargain on books on topics like the chronology of Russian monarchs.
Some colleges offer websites or physical bulletin boards where students can put books up for sale or rent. You can often save a lot of money on books this way. My college in South Carolina has a website dedicated to posting books and other items for sale, and I bought many books through that site through the course of my college career.
In conclusion, remember not to buy books new if you can get them used, as long as you’re not concerned about having a super-shiny cover. You can find many resources for locating textbooks if you take a bit of time to save a lot of money.
Continue reading:
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
MyBookCart.com is the premier book and textbook buyback website. Our main customers are college students who are looking to sell back textbooks at the end of each semester.
There is a good article here celebrationideasonline.com/saving-money-on-college-textbooks.html that also explores all the options out there now and what is up and coming to help students save money on their college textbooks
Its easy to get cheap textbooks if your use bigwords.com They are a textbook search engine that searches all the online textbook retailers (including amazon, half, ebay etc) and rental sites (including chegg, bookrenter etc) to find you the best prices. You can even use them at the end of the semester to search for resellers to sell your books to.
I always do Amazon (well, usually) or else I check the bulletin boards (online & real ones) looking to see if anyone else is getting rid of their used ones.
ecampus.com works for me though Amazon comes in handy a lot too.