Textbook time again

August 14, 2008 – 8:15 pm – No Comment

Well, it’s that time of year again. It’s time for all college students to return to classes and complain about textbook prices. Well, for four years I’ve been able to avoid most of the extremely expensive books. I have a couple of tricks that very few of my peers have taken part in.

First, if I can, I buy my books online. Campusbooks.com lets you compare prices on used books from several different online places. This also comes in handy for the second tip…

I also try to buy previous editions of textbooks. For example, in my consumer behavior class, the syllabus clearly stated that the previous edition of the textbook was accepted. However, plenty of my classmates decided to buy the $108 current edition. The previous edition cost me $5 AND it’s where the professor got most of her charts and graphs for PowerPoint presentations.

In a lot of my classes, the professors usually never use an entire book. I utilized iChapters.com and saved around $50 on my business stats book because we only needed a few chapters. At iChapters you can buy chapters instead of whole books.

Sometimes I don’t buy the book at all. In lecture classes, my professors usually never used the book for tests, but would test directly from lecture notes. This depends on the professor though, and usually doesn’t work for higher level classes. Ask my journalism ethics grade…I needed the book but was just too cheap to buy it.

Another way to save money on textbooks is to rent them. Websites like campusbookrentals.com let students rent books for periods of 55, 85, or 130 days and offer them at pretty good prices. For example, Principles of Macroeconomics by Case and Fair retails for around $130 (which is outrageous considering it’s a paperback…well it’s outrageous anyway) you can rent it at campus book rentals.com for around $34. However, I’ve never rented books… with this macroeconomics book, if you look at campusbooks.com you’ll see that the cheapest price online is $34.95 to BUY the book. I’d rather buy it then rent it because at the end of the semester, you can always sell it online too…