<p>I’m thinking about buying some textbooks online, but I have a few questions first.</p>
<li>What are some good places to buy them from?</li>
<li>How long does it usually take to ship? If I’m ordering soon and I won’t need them until mid-August, could I get away with just doing normal shipping?</li>
<li>Is it easy to sell them back? My college bookstore offers book buy back and I feel like the savings might not be as great if I end up stuck with the book.</li>
<li>How often do professors switch the required book? All the books are listed in the bookstore, but I’m worried that they might change it and I’ll be stuck with the wrong book and not be able to get the correct one in time.</li>
<li>Any tips for buying them?</li>
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<li><p>Buying books online is the way to go! Amazon.com and Half.com are the two I usually go through, sometimes eBay.com or a random online bookstore that pops up in a Google search.</p></li>
<li><p>It depends. Some companies and sellers are quick and you'll get them within a few days, some take closer to two weeks. It should never take over a month unless there's a serious problem with the order. If you're ordering two months ahead of time, definitely just pay for regular shipping.</p></li>
<li><p>Also depends. If it's a common book that lots of students own, it will be very hard to re-sell it online, and you're better off trying to sell it to another student at your school. If it's a less common book, you may be able to sell it and make most of your money back. I've even made a slight profit by buying and selling a textbook online.</p></li>
<li><p>The professor usually sets the book. If there's a change in professor, there may be a change in book, but probably not. You should be fine going by what the bookstore lists. If you're really concerned, email the professor to double-check.</p></li>
<li><p>Be wary of buying from personal sellers online. Most of the time, sellers are honest, but I have been screwed over several times by dishonest sellers who take my money but never send me the book or who send me a book in poorer quality than what I purchased. Major websites will usually protect you from bad sellers, but it will take time and it's a hassle.</p></li>
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<li><p>I usually go through the Amazon marketplace, but I've also used Alibris and recently I've been doing well with ValoreBooks. I'll often just plug the author and title and edition number (for textbooks -- I use ISBNs for books that are likely to have a wider audience, like Hemingway novels) into Google and see what comes up. Note that your bookstore is likely to have used copies on the shelf, too.</p></li>
<li><p>Some places will tell you how fast things will ship. With Amazon, you can go back and cause problems if they don't ship within 2 days (and don't tell you it will take longer), and I've never had anything take longer than 3 without notification. Where it's coming from also matters -- if I order something from my state it's likely to spend less time in transit than if I order something from halfway across the country -- but unless something is shipping from overseas, 2 weeks is a safe estimate for standard shipping. (I did once have something from Alibris take 4 months, by which point I had been refunded the cost of the book, but that was the Post Office's fault.)</p></li>
<li><p>How many used copies can you find out there? The more there are, the harder it is going to be to unload yours on your own. And the better you keep yours, the easier it's going to be. I would much rather have a clean or almost clean copy of a book than one with highlighting and pen marks in the margins, and I'm willing to pay more for a clean copy than for one that's messed up. A friend of mine tells me that law students are exactly the opposite: it's not hard to go through and highlight the important bits so you can trust whoever had the book before you, but it's time-consuming. Therefore a book that's already marked up means less work.</p></li>
<li><p>Each professor is going to place a book order each semester, so once you have registered, start checking the bookstore to see whether your section of the class has anything there yet. (Bookstores will sometimes wait until the last moment to release that information, because then people are more likely to buy from them.) How often the text is going to change will depend on a lot of things: some public schools have requirements that texts no more than x year old be used; some schools have standardized things to the point that every single section of a given class will be using the same book(s); and so on. So if you order before you know what book(s) your section is being assigned, you're gambling.</p></li>
<li><p>In the absolute worst-case scenario, where you've waited to order the book and the bookstore didn't provide the information until the last minute and the book hasn't arrived and you need to use it <em>right away</em>, check out the bookstore's return policy. You can often buy a copy, be extremely careful with it, and return it. (Ordinarily that strikes me as cheating, but bookstores withholding information about what books everybody needs so that people can't shop around strikes me as cheating too.)</p></li>
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<li><p>Amazon is the way to go! (especially Amazon Marketplace)</p></li>
<li><p>I got all of my books within a week of ordering them with regular shipping. If you use Amazon Marketplace, you can see where the book will ship from and pick a seller that lives closer to you.</p></li>
<li><p>My college's bookstore buys back a certain number of every textbook, regardless of whether you bought it there or not. I have been able to resell all of my books as long as I did not wait until the end of finals week. Some other bookstores want to see your receipt before they buy back your book, so you could not resell a cheap book from Amazon.</p></li>
<li><p>I have not run into that problem so far because I never bought a book before the first day of a class for two reasons: to find out whether a textbook is required or supplemental (I usually don't buy the supplemental ones) and because I am never quite sure which classes I will be taking before the beginning of the semester. The first week of classes at my college is called "shopping week" because we can attend as many classes as we would like, and we don't have to commit to any of them until the beginning of the second week. </p></li>
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<p>It has never been a problem that I did not have the textbooks at the beginning of the semester. Most professors are aware of shopping week and don't expect students to have the textbook early in the semester. If I have to use a textbook before my shipment arrives, I use Amazon's "search inside" function to get temporary access to the pages that I need.</p>
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<li><p>have no loyalties to any site. just go where you can get the cheapest price for the book. that is why i will recommend Compare</a> Discount Book Prices & Save up to 90% - GetTextbooks.com it's a search engine of all sites that sell textbooks and it will give you the lowest price and tell you if it's used or free (amazon, half, albiris, etc are all searched).</p></li>
<li><p>it varies from website to website, and from seller to seller. normally standard shipping is 5-9 days. you can usually wait 2 weeks into the semester though. it's not like you're going to go thru 10 textbooks within the first month.</p></li>
<li><p>that depends on your college bookstore. worse case scenario you can sell them off on a site like amazon or half.com. or even put up flyers or let friends know in your school that you're selling books for x class.</p></li>
<li><p>do not buy the book now. it's too early. what you'd want to do is e-mail the professor. tell them that you're a student in 'x' class (specify the class since professors often each multiple classes) and that you'd like to know what books will be required. ask them to provide you the isbn number if possible. some won't respond, some will. it all depends. generally i've found most respond back.</p></li>
<li><p>yes. read 1-4 above.</p></li>
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<p>I used ecampus, which saved me a few dollars. The only problem was that the information the professor sent to the class indicated the 9th edition, but when we started the class, she wanted the 10th edition. At that point, the 10th edition was backordered and it was a pain to try to return the 9th edition.</p>
<p>bookstores and libraries often make human mistakes. i once contacted a professor to verify if she was gonna use a book listed in the bookstore and she said that it was the wrong book and to hold off on buyin the book until it was corrected. of course she told me the book she was gonna use and i bought it online, but it would have been such a waste of money to have bought the book in advance. so always verify or ask your professor. you lose nothing in asking, but can save money by doing so.</p>
<p>I signed up for a membership at bn.com and primarily use them for ordering textbooks. They generally outperform Amazon.com by a wide margin when it comes to the amount of time that they take to ship a textbook. bn.com runs most of the university bookstores in my neck of the woods. I will also use Amazon.com if that works out better (price is better and time is not a factor). I've also used Amazon marketplace to find a local seller of a book.</p>
<p>Another person here who had bought the wrong book.</p>
<p>I bought the wrong edition because thats what the bookstore listed. I was so mad when the week before class the prof emailed the whole class claiming it was the wrong edition. My parents had to shell out almost 200$ to get the new one. So either email the prof or wait a bit.</p>
<p>Now to the question. Online is good just make sure that you can return the book if theres something wrong with it. Also before you do online see if your school has some sort of book exchange because sometimes upper year students will sell REALLY cheap (I know I do).</p>
<p>Are you willing to sell on Amazon or a similar site?</p>
<p>Are the courses you're planning to take ones that are offered every semester with all the relevant faculty using the same texts, or are they courses that are offered less frequently or are personalized by each instructor?</p>
<p>Will the courses be taught in the spring semester by adjuncts or new hires?</p>
<p>What condition are your books going to be in at the end of the semester?</p>
<p>What is the publication date on the books?</p>
<p>Are there new editions in the publishers' pipelines right now?</p>
<p>Are faculty at your school required to use the most recent edition of a textbook, or to use a textbook no more than x years old?</p>
<p>Are there better translations of translated books due to come out in the near future?</p>
<p>Is there a really wonderful book on the same topic about to be unveiled?</p>
<p>Do you have classmates who will want to keep their texts so they can refer back to them?</p>
<p>Will you need the books right up until you take the finals, or can you part with them ahead of time?</p>
<p>You're asking a question that really doesn't have a clear answer. There are a lot of factors.</p>
<p>you do save money. tons of it by buying used books though. for example, there was a textbook i bought for my first stats class sophomore year. it was the 5th edition (the professor let us use 5th or 6th edition). i got it used for like 3 bucks (and it actually turned out to be a brand new edition, pure coincidence). my friend ending up paying like 120 bucks for the 6th edition. there was nothing to be gained from having that edition. if you think you're not saving money by buying used books (even if you can't sell the book off) you have no idea what it's like then to buy textbooks yet.</p>
<p>Saving on textbooks means getting them at cheaper prices than the school sells them. You won't always be able to sell the textbook. Sometimes you will, but not always. I've been lucky enough this past year that I've had some people on campus who do some work for some company that buys used books from students. i didn't get much in return for the books (only like 9 bucks) but then again i didn't pay much for the books to begin with so i didn't really care, i just had no room for them.</p>
<p>also i know i said it earlier, but do wait until AT LEAST a month before classes before you even consider buying books. e-mail and verify with the professors. and if you're going to room with someone, check if you'll have similar classes. you might save some money if your roommate needs the same textbook and you can both split costs or work something out where you don't both have to get the same textbook twice.</p>
<p>^ I didn't really mean that I wouldn't save any money. My point is that I usually get 50% back on the books that I sell back. If I buy it online for 40% of the bookstore price, that's not saving that much money. I guess it all adds up to a pretty good sized savings in the end.</p>
<p>All of you have offered great advice about this and I will definitely try to talk my mom into letting me order the books online when it comes closer to time. Thank you!</p>
<p>If I have pdf versions of the books and my laptop, will the professors care? This would save me money and I wouldn't have to carry around those heavy books all day.</p>
<p>Pistolen: I've used PDF texts and ebooks before (Google is great for free ebooks). I can't see why a professor would care what format your textbook is in. You may be disadvantaged, however, if you have an open-book exam and don't know exactly which pages you'll need to print, or if want to study with a group of students and don't have a way to transport your file (such as a laptop).</p>
<p>I wouldn't expect them to care. (On the other hand, I also wouldn't expect them to be particularly moved if you ask for a makeup midterm because a computer-related disaster resulted in you not having the book to study. Nor would I expect them to be moved if you accidentally dropped your hardcopy book over the Hoover Dam.)</p>
<p>If you land in one of the relatively rare classes where you're expected to bring your book every day and refer to it, I would speak to the professor after the first class to explain the situation. Many, many instructors dislike laptops in the classroom in part because they believe that students using them are doing something other than concentrating on the class. Others dislike them because they find them disruptive.</p>
<p>Well, I guess for proctored open-book exams print-outs of ebooks might be a problem because it is hard for the proctors to verify that the stack of papers does not include a few pages that were not in the book, so they might not let you use it.</p>