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How to Save on College Textbooks
Published on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 by Nohel Category: College Tips
College Textbooks
When you start college, you might be shocked to find how much you have to spend on textbooks. Your college textbooks and required reading lists can literally cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year, depending on which subjects you’re taking. One thing you need to know is that your campus bookstore is often the most expensive place to buy your books. There are a number of cheaper options, however, many of which are also kinder to the environment.
- Buy on the web from one of the many online bookstores that generally offer lower prices than bricks-and-mortar outlets. If you use a price comparison site to search for the best deals first, you’ll save even more. Some web-based bookstores also sell used textbooks at even lower prices. Try our cheap college textbooks to compare prices and find the best deals on college textbooks!
- Buy used books. If you can get to your campus bookstore before classes start, you might be lucky enough to snag some used books for a discounted price. They sell out really fast, though, so most students end up paying the full price at the store.
- Rent books online. Several textbook rental sites have sprung up over the past few years, and they’re becoming ever more popular with cash-strapped students. You can reckon on spending between 30% and 50% of the new price on renting a book for a semester, but you’ll have to be careful to keep it in good condition and not go too crazy with the highlighter.
- Rent books from your campus bookstore. A few colleges have on-campus stores that rent out texts in addition to selling them.
- Buy electronic versions of the books you need. Many textbook publishers are now selling downloadable texts at around half the price of printed books.
- Check public domain sites for free downloadable copies of books whose copyrights have expired. English majors can find a lot of older books at no cost online, but you could also be in luck if you’re studying other subjects such as history, economics, political science or anthropology.
- Exchange books with friends who’ve taken your subject previously. Set up a text exchange group with people from different years and you should be able to swap some of your used books for the ones you need this quarter. It’s worth saving books from previous years to use as exchange “currency”.
- Don’t forget to sell leftover textbooks when you graduate to get back some of the money you’ve spent.
The best one stop shop for all your textbook comparison prices is on our Cheap Textbooks tab in the navigation bar. We will compare your book for the cheapest price available, and also include prices for rental or ebook.
College Textbooks: “Save on textbooks and do your research ahead of time. Most of the time, you will find it cheaper online rather than the bookstore.”
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14 Responses to “How to Save on College Textbooks”
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Competition within the market has really helped with the cost of textbooks. The rise of internet companies that are now not only buying and selling new and used books online but are also renting them as well has really helped students save money. Out of all the textbook companies I’ve used, the one I had the most success with offers free shipping on orders over $49, which was helpful to me since with the expense of buying textbooks, the last thing I wanted to do was pay for shipping too.
Heather, thanks for sharing your experience. You are absolutely correct, the cost of college textbooks is a big expense, so comparing prices online is even more important now than ever before.
As fun as it may be to open up a freshly printed, new smelling textbook, consider purchasing as many used textbooks as you can. The reality is, you probably will not want to keep most of your books, anyway, especially those needed for classes that are not in your program of major study. Why spend a lot of cash on a book that you will only use for a few weeks? And here’s something else kind of interesting to think about: the student who had the book before you may have actually highlighted and underlined important material—maybe that even took good notes!—so you will not have to do it. Before you purchase a used textbook, look through it carefully to make sure it is in a condition you can live with, and that will not be distracting to you. If you are buying your books from an online used books dealer, you will not be able to see the books beforehand, so be careful.
Getting cheap college textbooks is almost a science. I checked out your Cheap Textbooks section and tested it to see how much I could get my book for. The book store was selling my BIOL book for $155 (whoa, that was high!), but I found it online through your cheap textbooks widget for $40!!
Thanks!
Barry
nice point you got there! with costly college education, as well as commodities of today, it’s really hard to keep a bit for savings. way back in my college times, my medical books cost more than a hundred dollar per one new book. It was very frustrating because i could only buy few because i couldn’t afford to buy all. This article is a big help to students so they can have an idea on alternatives to getting books without spending much. They’re very lucky that there are many cheap rentals on college textbooks available online.
I always buy my books online…the bookstore hikes prices way up…thanks for the tips here…I’m going to check my books out on your comparison page…I’ll report back how my experience went.
I used your “Cheap Textbooks” page and I got hooked up! My bookstore was charging me over $350 for this fall’s books. But I spent less than $100 using your site! A couple were from the Amazon results that I got. It’s definitely recommended for other students…
Just got my books from your Cheap Textbooks page…saved 180 bucks!!! Thanks…
This will be my first time buying college textbooks online…i hope it goes well..eek :-/
How do I go about finding a specific edition if I don’t have the ISBN number on your Cheap Textbooks page?
Thanks,
Carrey
I can’t believe how many books I need for my classes this semester! Are other people in the same boat? What are you guys doing?
I need all the help I can get with textbooks. Something cool I found on your site were some really cheap ebooks instead of having to buy the textbooks.
Thanks!
I am starting back in school and looking to buy some cheap text books for my second semester
Of college? Where do I find best deals on my books? Anyone want to help?
Tom- I’d encourage you to take a look at our textbook search engine for the cheapest textbooks online. You can benefit from it by going to College Textbooks, and search for any book, ideally by ISBN number, or title and author if you don’t have the ISBN. The search engine will search online for you and give you results based on price and vendor.
That should help you find some of the best deals online. Otherwise, you can also check out other places like DealOz.