<p>Is it a good idea to buy my books through half ebay? Or am I better off just buying through the UCLA bookstore?</p>
<p>you can get books a lot cheaper if you shop around online… unless it’s something you really can’t find anywhere else, i wouldn’t buy from the ucla store.</p>
<p>dealoz.com</p>
<p>some campuses offer link+ in which you don’t have to buy you’re book instead you can borrow it from the library and if they don’t have it there they borrow it from any other CSU or UC. It’s free and useful for those books that you only need for like a wk or so.</p>
<p>Chegg to rent books, half and other book combing searchers, the stingystudent add-on will help once it’s updated for the new book season. (Firefox)</p>
<p>Thanks everyone, sounds good. One more question though…alot of classes require or suggest workbooks. I’m guessing those should be bought new through the UCLA book store?</p>
<p>Where can we see the ISBN for textbooks we need? I am planning to buy my books from amazon/half. I know the UCLA store has the name/title of the books, but I want to see the ISBN in the case I get the wrong edition or something.</p>
<p>Half used to have the lowest prices. Now it is Amazon. It’s all about the demand and prices which booksellers can manipulate.</p>
<p>If you really want to save money on buying textbooks…</p>
<p>I wouldn’t recommend buying from the UCLA store or from Textbook Plus. Spend some time and look it up online. Get it shipped to your home or school address (if you are OOS). You’ll save time wasted waiting in line when school starts. </p>
<p>If possible, look for textbook sellers on MyUCLA. The response rate is not very high, but you might be able to find heavily discounted.</p>
<p>Try what Deuces recommended as well.</p>
<p>The best time to buy a book is right now, when the demand is low. Not when school starts, or the 1-2 weeks before. If you buy from an online bookstore (Half.com, Amazon), the sellers will increase the cost, because they know the demand is high and you will have to buy it no matter what the price is (if reasonable).</p>
<p>Using reverse logic, the best time to sell a book is when people want it, which is when the school quarter starts.
Sell it online. Why do textbook buyback when you can put in some effort and sell it online? You’ll make much more that way if the book is a popular one.</p>
<p>But … if money is not a problem, then ignore what I wrote and buy from the UCLA store and save your efforts looking online for cheap textbook deals. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>If you want to extract the isbn from the ucla store, there is a firefox greasemonkey script floating around somewhere on this forum–search for it. And like Jinobi said, use dealoz to compare prices among many online retailers. Amazon, Half, and ebay are generally reliable. CollegeBooksDirect is great for new books, plus their delivery is ridiculously fast. I got a new linear algebra book in three days for about $50 off ucla’s price, shrink wrapped too :D</p>
<p>edit–whoa, prices on CollegeBooksDirect are slowly going up. Supply and demand in action.</p>
<p>amazon.com</p>
<p>half.com</p>
<p>To get the ISBN:</p>
<p>Goto the bookstore page with the book you want. Goto “View” on your browser then goto “Page Source” or “Source.” CTRL + F and search for “Prefer New.” To the left of that will be “OPTION SELECTED value=XXXXXXXX.” XXXXXXXX= the ISBN number.</p>
<p>If you know how to use Firebug , that will help a lot (but don’t ask me how to use it if you don’t already know how). More focused toward web developers.</p>
<p>^ clearly firebug is beyond what these kids can handle. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>too true GB too true.</p>
<p>Tip if you are going to buy from the UCLA book store (for proprietary bundles or readers or if by some rift in the space time continuum they actually offer a lower price than elsewhere): don’t go with a backpack or bag or purse. The huge line outside is for people to check in their bags. If you don’t have a bag, they will let you walk right in without waiting in line. Of course, you still have to wait in the inside line to pay.</p>
<p>does anyone know what the difference between the loose leaf and the hardback books are? i’m a bit confused on what exactly is loose leaf o_O</p>
<p>^ loose leaf is just regular notebook paper lol</p>
<p>Loose leafe = typically a stack of sheets of paper, usually hole-punched so you can put it in a binder (pull out pages to study, only bring a small amount of pages to class, etc.) I’m a fan of the oldschool bound books though… geezer status.</p>
<p>I would check out bookfinder4u.com. It aggregates a lot of storefronts/marketplaces into one site.</p>