<p>Has anyone done this? According to the sellers, international editions are the same as the US editions except for being softcover and hundreds of dollars cheaper...</p>
<p>They also tend to have black/white images instead of color and be of shoddier quality (with pages falling out and stuff). </p>
<p>The thing to remember is that they hold no resale value. Whereas with a hardcover US edition textbook, you can recoup a pretty solid percentage of the new value (as long as the edition is up to date and the book is in good shape), the international versions are hard to sell.</p>
<p>I bought some books online as international editions.
Being softcover, they are more flimsy.</p>
<p>And not all international edition books are black/white. That is the only problem I see – you have to make sure they say that the book they are selling is in color (I believe the black/white, shoddy paper ones are ‘Indian’ edition, or something along those lines). </p>
<p>Same content, though</p>
<p>If you’re not planning to resell it, go for it. Some international books have pretty poor printing quality, but I’ve been more than satisfied with most of my engineering books which I’ve bought on eBay.</p>
<p>If I couldn’t find a cheap version on half.com, I almost always went international. They’re perfectly fine to use, never had the experience of black/white pages or any of that bs. As for “quality”, all you need is text on a page, why would it matter if the page is thick and glossy or thin paper? </p>
<p>I just always went for the absolute cheapest versions, I think anything else is just a waste of cash.</p>