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College and graduate school classes are starting soon. Have you bought your books?
If not, don’t use the campus bookstore.
You can find cheap college books in many places, other than the single store your university is hoping you’ll use. Since you’re already living on a shoestring budget, you need to save money wherever possible. Buying used, cheap textbooks is a great way to cut your educational costs.
Bookbyte is my favorite used book website. They have a huge selection of books, and they even offer study guides and supplies. You could probably buy everything that you need in one visit to their site.
AbeBooks also boasts a large selection of books. They seem to cater a little more towards the rare book market. So if Bookbyte doesn’t have your book, you can probably get it from AbeBooks.
BetterWorld Books provides a great shopping option for the socially conscious consumer. They ship your books for free anywhere in the United States, and they offset the shipping environmental costs through CarbonFund. They also host book drives to provide books and funding for literacy programs. To date, they have donated over $4 million and 11 million books. Incredible!
Biblio is another book site, much like Bookbyte. They also have a good assortment of rare and out-of-print books.
You do need to be careful when buying used textbooks online. They’re cheap college books, but it’s not always easy to find the correct edition for your course. To ensure that you buy the best discount books, follow these tips.
Compile a list - You need a comprehensive list of all your required college textbooks. Some university bookstores have an online book list, but you may have to go to the campus bookstore. Write out your list with the course, professor, and books required. For the books, be sure to note the title, author, and edition.
Check it twice - Seriously. You need to make sure your list is accurate. You don’t want to buy a textbook for the wrong course.
Look for your books - When you’re shopping at a site like Bookbyte, you can search for books by ISBN, title, author, or even keyword. The ISBN is your most accurate locator, but a title / author search can usually work as well.
Verify the edition - For every book that you locate, double check the edition! I cannot stress that enough. If a book seller doesn’t list the edition, you can try to call to find out. But you can most likely find the same book somewhere else that does list the edition.
Ask your professor - If you found a really cheap book that is an older edition, you can always ask the professor if that edition will work. Most professors have taught their courses for years, and they know what changes have been made to the book editions. Some will say that an older edition is fine, and others will not. It never hurts to ask.
When you’re done with a college textbook, you should consider selling it back to get some cash. You won’t recover everything you paid for it, but every bit helps.
I’ve written two comprehensive articles on selling used college books. Some of the same sites above (like Bookbyte) will buy your books back from you, no matter where you got them.
This is my basic tutorial that shows how easy it is to sell your books online.
If you want to take it to another level, check out my post on maximizing your textbook cash.
To save money during college, I'd skip the new editions and buy the older ones...
It's a bit of a risk (especially for numbers classes like accounting, finance, calculus, etc). But it is perfect for courses like marketing, management, psychology, etc.
Marketing/management prinicples don't take any drastic changes over two or three years... Same with psychology; professors tend to teach the same studies, no matter what text book they use. The core principles stay the same.
The major changes stem from the examples used and maybe some new case studies or statistics. But generally, the books have the same material; they just rearrange it a little bit.
(It's kind of BS when you think about it...)
I swear by campusi.com
It searcher 200+ bookstores at a time (including half.com and amazon), and I always find the best prices through it.
As a former Teaching Assistant, I can say it's typically safe to by the 10th edition instead of the 11th. The introduction to the book might change --- whoopee. And to stick it to you, the publisher might change the pagination, which means you need to match up assigned reading topics to your new pages --
One professor I knew used the old edition to write his syllabus, and the book store stocked the newer edition. Students freaked that the page numbers didn't match up exactly -- which stumped us both. And we both told students, if this week we're talking about the film industry, perhaps you might want to read the pages on film, the publishing and journalism fields, likewise.
I like your idea Andy, but for me it's too much of a risk to use the older edition of a textbook. I just don't think the risk of possibly missing new information is worth the reward (saving some money). Additionally new editions of textbooks almost always have different end of chapter problems/projects/case studies, and having to constantly borrow a classmate's textbook to copy these assignments isn't going to endear you to anyone.
I bought my books in the college bookstore my first semester, and never again.
1. Try half.com (and any other online site you can find). If I'm not mistaken, ISBN's are different based on the edition, so as long as you have the ISBN right, you should get the right edition. Unless you're in a science or nursing class, you should be able to find a used copy of the current edition.
2. Work in a bookstore, or find someone who works for one and try to use their discount. I worked at Barnes & Noble 3 out of my 4 years in college. The general discount was 30%, and it applied to textbooks, even though they were marked "no additional discount" in the system. Twice a year, in June and December, we got an extra 10% added to our discount for employee appreciation--just in time for me to get 40% off the textbooks I couldn't find used online.
40% off! That's incredible. I'll have to remember that for my next article on book deals. :)
Renting Textbooks is also becoming a very solid option for students, as it requires less money upfront (See Chegg.com).
When it comes to buying textbooks online, you might want to check out this independent study on the cheapest places to buy textbooks.
The study also looked at the best places to sell back your textbooks.
There is yet another extremely affordable alternative - buy them from 3rd world countries like India. I bought them brand stinking new from my home country of Malaysia priced at 25%. I sold them later on Amazon at 75% and pocked the profit of 50%. My professor who wrote an Electromagnetics textbook once said he loses USD$7 everytime somebody buys an International version of his book.
you can also ask your professor to put copies of course readings on reserve in the library --- typically you can borrow them a few hours at a time, enough to do your reading and take notes
Although I'm done with college, I thought this was so great! I have friends still attending and I'll pass along. Wish I'd know about it back in the day! Thanks! :)
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