Textbook Tips and Tricks

Tell her to ask one of the people in her class? Seems pretty retarded to wait until 1 day before something is due to figure that out though.

yeah she never ran into that problem, but theres a few times where the teachers ended up not ever using the books and shes wasted money.

Does she know that you can e-mail the professor before classes begin and ask if you actually need what's listed?

The real problem is waiting one day before an assignment is due to try and figure this out. Your gf is the type of student that rustles my jimmies. Ah well, hopefully she learns a lesson from this.

You can buy it off Amazon and get it shipped next day, but if something is due tomorrow then I don't know how that helps. You can buy a kindle edition of the book too.

I have had a lot of luck just searching for .pdf files of textbooks in google. Really cut costs that way.

I bought all my books my first semester. Spent ~$350. Hardly used any of them. After that, the first thing I would check for each class was the syllabus. Just about every syllabus I came across had class schedules and due dates for assignments. If anything was assigned directly from the book, I would hunt around and try and track it down. If not, then I usually never bothered.

I also had a friend in the same program and we would go in on those books together since we were going to be studying together for those classes anyways. Don't do this with shitheads though; nothing worse than being chained to a shmuck who loses your book or is never available to study.

All comes down to the professor really. Most colleges require the professors to list required texts, to you know, help promote $tudying and $hit. Decent, upstanding and amazing professors will understand that students are creatures of least resistance and design the course to not actually require much of a monetary investment. Pricks who think they are enlightened messiahs, or new professors without a clue, will stack the lists with cartloads of overpriced mandatory crap.

About the only real lesson I learned from text books was how to be resourceful, so I didn't have to pay for the fuckin things.

It's been said before in this thread and in every other iteration of it, but buy older editions if you can. 99% of the time they are fine.

This is going away as more and more professors use the online supplement that comes with the book though.

Also consider renting the textbook from Amazon if you know you don't want to keep it.

Half.com is a great resource for buying used books.

I rent all the books I can. Usually is about half the buy price.

For the books I do buy, I either keep the ones related to my degree or I sell the books asap after class. The longer you wait the less value they have. I tried to sell a few 2 year old texts book and none were worth more than 5 bucks and one was worth a penny.