Textbook Tips and Tricks

Buy shit off amazon, bookburro book mole etc a semester in advance. I routinely snag $300 textbooks for 20 bucks, review books for pennies. Generally an edition or two behind the current version doesn't hurt anything. Google the shit out of the ISBN number, title, authors. Usually you can find a PDF if you try hard enough and it's a popular enough book, even though you might end up with a virus.

Also, talk to people who have taken the course to find out what you really did or didn't need.

Asking the professor really doesn't work that well. Once I took a stupid fucking required archaeology class (WTF, UT, WTF) and there was like $800 worth of required textbooks. I double checked with her the first week, and she insisted they were all required in order to pass etc. We ended up using none of them, not even referenced once during the entire semester. I managed to get them all for ~300 somehow, really wrecked my budget. Still mad about that.

I still hate her eight years later, stupid fat whore.

Also, with a little bit of work you can also make your money back either selling back to the university book store, or amazon.

I steal my cardboard from costco, free shipping!

I don't trust chegg because much like shady landlords, there's no guarantee they're not going to try to screw me on the deposit. They could be legit though, who knows.

Renting textbooks is usually a bad deal. You pay a premium so you don't have to deal with selling the book again.

Buy it used from amazon, half.com, or even ebay, which tends to have international versions of textbooks. Those come either on cheap paper (India) or high-quality print (not India) and are identical except for the cover image. They're usually significantly cheaper - maybe a third of the price of the US version.

You can usually find books required for courses in the library, too. Alternatively, your library is probably part of some network like the Interlibrary Loan System or ezborrow, or whatever else there is. If so, they can get just about any book for you - you just have to request it through the online system. If you can't figure out how, go to the library and ask them.

Some textbooks they cannot get, but if any of the assigned books are not "textbooks" (probably true for the above mentioned archeology class), it's no problem at all. Even textbooks you can generally get... I think I have about $1,000 worth of current-edition business textbooks here.

Previous editions, teacher's editions, and international editions from the usual sources have gotten me 3/4 of the way through a Biology degree with a 3.93. Found PDF's for a bunch of stuff too, especially for the big core courses. I have a digital copy of my Bio I and II, O Chem I and II, and Gen Chem I and II books that were all easily found. I like having a hard copy around so I just go to one of the computer labs and print up chapters at a time. Copies are in greyscale, but its still free and I have saved hundreds of dollars over the past four years.

My wife used Chegg her last semester of graduate school. She didn't get screwed but I have no idea if it would have been cheaper to just buy it used or not. So the company is legit, I just have no opinion on the cost relative to buying it used.

I wholeheartedly recommend buying a previous edition regardless of what your professor tells you. If they demand you buy the newest edition they are full of shit and probably wrote the book so they want a cut of the sales.

Amazon has decent prices on some books and with prime the free shipping helps immensely. I don't have an Amazon Prime membership but I've made free one month trials each semester to get the books I need from there.

Half Price Books, both the brick and mortars as well as the online store is a good source as well. I found my Physics 1 book squirreled away at a brick and mortar for half of the cheapest price I could find online.

Eyashusa_sl said:

I wholeheartedly recommend buying a previous edition regardless of what your professor tells you. If they demand you buy the newest edition they are full of shit and probably wrote the book so they want a cut of the sales.

Click to expand...

Some are lazy and just recommend the newest version. However, sometimes there are good reasons for doing so. For example, some textbooks now come with a significant online offering that is actually neat to use in a course. So you can just assign homework straight from the book and get feedback on what questions students get right.

In other cases, they just assign problems from the textbook and you can just copy them from someone's book. That's no big deal.

Ya sometimes you just can't avoid the screwing if the prof. assigns homework through MasteringChemistry, MyMathLab, etc. and even if you picked up a cheap used copy you still have to buy access to the assigned homework.

True, the online thing is a new caveat that I forgot about.

And now I remember another thing that pisses me off... new books that come with some one time use code for a stupid online function... makes it so that no one will buy the book used and you have to buy it new every time.

I've found that most classes with an online book component also have a torrent if you look hard enough. Download the PDF for free and just purchase the code online for $50-$75. Still cheaper than buying a new copy with an unused code for $175-$250.

Eyashusa_sl said:

And now I remember another thing that pisses me off... new books that come with some one time use code for a stupid online function... makes it so that no one will buy the book used and you have to buy it new every time.

Click to expand...

Honestly, I think that's fair. At least that's textbook providers offering something beyond the printed text. In some cases, it's actually fairly elaborate and I think helpful to many students. I rather see that than the continuous screwing around with editions, where nothing changes except the numbering of chapters/problems.

Textbook publishers have to make money somehow... for most books, the market is fairly limited, so you get a high per piece cost. The whole trend toward fancy pictures and everything in colors didn't help with price either. Of course, compare a modern textbook with an old one, and I know which one I'd rather read.

Its too bad that Oxford University Press is the only major non profit publisher.

When I took Logic the professor flat out told us to be the prior edition because he and the other professor for the class had gone through it every single question was the same. That's what started me going on buying older editions. There were a couple of situations where I really, really did need current textbook but I was still saving hundreds and hundreds of dollars a semester.

I would usually go to the book store and write down the ISBNs a couple of weeks before the semester started. Then, I'd look for the cheapest book on campusi.com (now apparently called dealoz.com for some reason), which looks pretty similar to the book mole site already mentioned. Since they're shipping usually from India, I had times where I didn't have the book for the first week and would have to do homework out of the library or photocopy a couple pages, but it never ended up being a big deal. I actually prefer the international edition books since they're usually soft cover and sometimes also dimensionally smaller, which made them a lot nicer to lug around, especially if I had 2 or 3 classes in rapid succession.

I got burned once on an older edition of a book, so, I always avoided them after that. I got lucky and never had to use any of that online shit, but I'm guessing that's starting to get more prevalent.

Also, I used Chegg once for a book I couldn't find discounted anywhere and didn't run into any issues other than the rental term ended maybe a semester before my finals. It didn't matter in my case, but it's something to keep in mind.

I worked for a used book distributor in their IT department while I went to school (I had previously had 6 years of IT experience). They were a direct competitor of Chegg. Speaking as someone who was able to buy any books we had in stock for cost, the best way to do it is buy shit on half.com. Buy from there and then sell it back on half.com at the end of the semester and you should break even. It's ridiculous, but it's true. You may need to wait around a few weeks to find the best prices, but it beats the shit out of flushing $50-100 reselling a book otherwise.

I always buy the international editions off of Amazon or wherever I can find them.

Once I'm done with the book I sell it through Amazon. I'll list it with the regular US edition that everyone sees upon first click. I just put in the description that it's international. Then I price the international below the main listings, but higher than what I bought it for in the first place. Great way to make extra money through college.

Tuco_sl said:

Download the books off torrents.

Click to expand...

This. Fuck the man.

If i can't find it on torrents, I look for pdfs out in the deep web. If I can't get deep enough to find it, alibris.com or any one of a hundred other sites can usually get them for dirty cheap.