<p>My DD used Amazon for a couple of good reasons.</p>
<ol>
<li>Their ratings of condition were usually accurate.</li>
<li>They have an excellent resale policy. After the first term, she actually sold her text books back and kept a credit with Amazon for future textbook purchases. I’m not sure how she did this…but she did.</li>
<li>Their shipping was quick.</li>
</ol>
<p>It depends on the school bookstore.
Oldest had a pretty good bookstore at her college which was handy since for the 1st semester for one class ( Hum110) she had about 17 required books on her list ( and different books for 2nd term, however they used many of them year to year). Her city also has [url=<a href=“Powell’s Books | The World’s Largest Independent Bookstore”>http://www.powells.com/]Powells-[/url</a>] a humungous independent new & used bookstore to search for books that Reed didn’t have used.
Science texts can be very expensive- but we also were able to find pretty good deals through Amazon & often found brand new books for a fraction of the cost new elsewhere.
Younger daughter rents about a 1/3 of her books, buys on Amazon about 1/3 & from school bookstore a 1/3.</p>
<p>I’m currently working on my MBA, so I’m well practiced on looking for textbooks. If it is not a textbook that you will have any interest in keeping, rent it! I’ve used chegg.com a few time and I believe the other is e-textbooks.com, but you can rent texts for about 20% the cost of what it would cost to buy them.</p>
<p>Also for some texts you can find electronic editions for significantly lower costs than paper version. I think that will become even more popular in the next few years as all the students come to campus with Kindles and publishers hope to cut printing costs.</p>
<p>I’ve also had good luck with googling the ISBN and finding the lowest cost. I once bought a text with a ‘sticker price’ of around $180 for about $10 because all the pages had been ripped out of the binding. Every page was present and it was readable and frankly for the more than $150 I saved I didn’t care if I occasionally had to pick up a page that fell out.</p>
<p>Also most texts have much cheaper international editions. It seems most schools/professors recommend against buying these, but I’m beginning to feel like that’s some kind of ‘scam’ they have with the publishing companies. From what I hear, the text is usually identical and the only differences are in the problems and with the currency not being in dollars. Some professors who know that students occasionally get older/international editions will often make problems or material that is different available and if not, then you can find a friend from class and borrow their book or work with them on the problems. I’ve been in several MBA courses with classmates that purchased international versions and had absolutely no problem using them.</p>
<p>Another option for courses that don’t require constant access to the text is sharing the cost with a friend in the class and then taking turns with the book to read required material. If it’s a course that requires a lot of outside work that requires having the text on hand, the other options are probably better, but in courses where the text is just used for ‘reference’ material… English, history, etc that also include other supplementary materials/novels then splitting the cost with a friend in class can work our pretty well.</p>