College Textbook Costs

[Engelwood]

Everybody here is in some sort of GLO, why not call on your brothers or sisters for help? For used books, our chapter set up a "Book Trading" bulletin board at our house with all the books we had. We'd trade and sell books and end up making and saving more money than if we sold them to the bookstore.

I do hate it when publishers release a "new" version of the book with an added introduction and revised cover to charge full price.

[MsDGP007]

I saved a good deal of money this semester by buying books online. I priced the used books in the bookstore, and saved about $190 on books for 4 classes. In one class, I had to buy the book new, because it came with an online access code. I wish I could have done this when I was in college 10 years ago, that's for sure.

[nikki1920]

check with your teacher about which edition you can use. you can sometimes use the library for free books. and also, unless I know the book will be used the following semester, I just keep the book.

[RaggedyAnn]

A silver lining-places like Houghton Mifflin Books are working on software that will enable students to buy chapters of a book, instead of buying the whole thing. I wish they had that when I was buying books and the professor was using 3 chapters!

[nikki1920]

I HATED THAT!!!

Or what we used to have to get was a Coursepack. The professor would have these random articles, chapters, etc. bound in a pack and we'd have to pay for that separately. I had one for a class that was thick as a book and cost $150.

I swear, colleges make a good chunk of money off of books alone.

[Drolefille]

Bigwords.com

It searches everything from half.com, bn.com, amazon.com, textbookx.com etc. new and used for the best deals. And now they include guaranteed buybacks and bookrentals from Chegg.com and at least one other place.

I <3 them and use them every year to order my books. I only wish the rental sites had been around when I was an undergrad and didn't want to keep my books.

[SydneyK]

Many of the texts I use in class are classical philosphy texts which are available online. One semester, I had my syllabus posted online, and provided links to most of the texts I used. I gave the students the option of buying their books, using the library's copies, or printing selected passages from the links I provided. Lots and lots and lots of students complained that semester that I hadn't provided a particular edition of all the books used in my class. I was just trying to save them money, but they didn't want to put in the time each week to visit the link/library/whatever.

I still don't understand it.