<p>I am an international student and won’t arrive Boston until 25th Aug
If I wanna buy textbooks from amazon.com, should I order them after or before I arrive there? </p>
<p>And how long does it take for the books to arrive after I purchased? thanks!</p>
<p>Before, definitely! Unless you want to pay extra for fast shipping. Time it so that it arrives a day or two after you arrive. They give you the estimate delivery time</p>
<p>I read a few old posts here regarding the ISBN. Some people said it might be a problem if the ISBN does not match, while others said professors were not bothered about this. How much does this actually matter? I also plan to get my books from amazon.</p>
<p>Some professors require the exact same edition for homework and such, while other’s don’t care about the edition. You can contact the professor directly, or play it safe and get the edition B&N has.</p>
<p>When I wanted to purchase books, I attempted to use my B+N gift card. It didn’t work >_<. I checked and the money is still in there. (I also attempted to use a coupon found online, but I guess its reasonable why it didn’t work). On top of that all the books were charged for “new”, when I specifically asked for “used”. <em>sigh</em> Seems the system still has its kinks.</p>
<p>I think I read that the system won’t actually charge you until your order is ready to be picked up and will charge you the “used” price if it’s available.</p>
<p>when should I put the order? how long do the books arrived after I purchased?</p>
<p>for amazon should I just use standard shipping? as it says Delivery within 3 to 5 business days for standard shipping, I should order the books around a week before right?</p>
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<p>Ah ok… they DID ask for my credit card number. I will have to see if I can get the gift card used on the spot there…</p>
<p>Will I need my books immediately or is it worth holding out till the first few days of class to see if we’ll actually need it for the class? I’ve heard that books aren’t needed at all sometimes for classes.</p>
<p>Also, does the BU bookstore sell all the needed books?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>It’s worth holding out…kind of. Sometimes Amazon or other sellers don’t ship as reliably as you’d like, and you end up bookless for a little while. But I definitely bought all my books last fall only to find out for one class I didn’t need them AT ALL and in another we just read a chapter from each. So it can be good to scope out the class first.</p>
<p>Yeah BUBailey that’s why I don’t want to buy them all before classes start, multiple years in high school I bought all my books and found out a good amount weren’t needed at all.</p>
<p>Does the BU bookstore physically sell the textbooks or are sites/ordering the only option?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>Anson, What I would do is order them a day or two before your flight to Boston. So then they arrive within a couple of days after you get there.</p>
<p>the BU bookstore sells them too. they’re all organized by class, so as long as you have your schedule you can go in and pick up what you need. sometimes they run out, but not usually.</p>
<p>Hey Anson225, I called Housing and the rep told me packages should arrive after the 24th. However, you should confirm this as the staff at the housing office can be confusing at times. I was also wondering if there could be a problem with our addresses, i.e. if sellers deliver to addresses with a Box No. in them. Even if the books arrive after we move in, I don’t know if they’ll deliver them to the mail rooms… anybody who bought books from amazon and lived in the dorm style residences please help me out with this…</p>
<p>they’ll deliver them to the mail room. then the mail room staff will put a package slip in your mailbox and you pick up your package during mail room hours.</p>
<p>ya I think what I will do is to order them around 2 days before I go to Boston. Thank you all, this is really helpful! 
(and I also called, the packages should indeed arrive after the 24th)</p>
<p>Thanks a lot for making things clear everyone. Just want to add something here… even though I can not be 100% sure about this until I get the books, I think I’ve got this right… For those of you who are buying books from amazon, if you can’t find the book with the same publisher as stated in your book list in the BU Bookstore website, it might be because the amazon book description only includes the name of the publishing imprint, and not the publishing company that owns/uses the imprint. For example, there were books on my book list that had Pearson as their publisher. However, when I searched for these books on amazon, I found that the same books were published by Benjamin Cummings, Prentice Hall and Addison Wesley, but not Pearson. I later found out from the Pearson wiki page that these three were Pearson’s imprints and not different publishers. The same goes for Wadsworth, which is an imprint of Cengage Learning. You’ll not find the Concise Wadsworth Handbook published by Cengage on amazon, but you’ll find it to be published by Wadsworth, its imprint. So they’re the same book. So if you find books with different publishers, find out if the publishers are actually imprints of the main publisher that is stated on your b&n book list. If they are, you’ve got the right books. Again, I can not be absolutely sure about this, but it makes sense to me since it isn’t likely that B&N would have books that aren’t available on amazon. You guys might have already figured this all out.</p>
<p>^^this is very true, it helps to search the book in Google to find the publisher’s site, and see if any of the names they use match B&N</p>
<p>Just use the ISBN numbers, those are unique to only one book. Authors can write various books, but there can only be one ISBN number. Thats what I used…</p>
<p>The thing I suggested, use that when you don’t have the ISBNs. When you’ve got the ISBNs, you don’t need to check anything at all.</p>