so my school campus store is telling me i need some kind of “custom bundle/package” for a class next semester, but I found a textbook on Ebay with the same title, cover, everthing, just a different ISPN number… is there a difference? What makes the custom bundle so EXPENSIVE??? should i just use the ebay one? HELPP!! (HUGE PRICE DIFFERENCE $94 vs $235)
Email your professor or go to his/her office hours and explain the price difference. 99% of the time custom edition textbooks (think Intro Chemistry four UCSD, not a selection of papers and book excerpts) are just ways for textbook publishers to make more money and discourage used book sales.
Here’s what you can do… Go to the bookstore and take a good look at the textbook on the shelf. Make sure there isn’t something like a packaged lab manual or something.
When I was a freshman, my college had a custom edition of the federal government book. The real book was titled “Politics in America” by Dye. However, my college had ordered a custom edition of the book with a different cover, different TITLE, and such.
Aside from the cover, the ONLY thing different inside was there was a map of campus and a “Welcome to XXXXXXXXX college!” page written with the Calibri font from Microsoft Office 2010.
Nothing was changed. All the typos were left as is, no special diagrams added within the text. Nothing. All the chapters were in order.
If you buy the real textbook, you’re still going to learn the same thing in essence. The only problem might lie in the selected exercises, but it’s HIGHLY unlikely that the professor actually changed the order of the problem sets in the book. As in, your professor has better things to do in life than pick a different order.
Double check with your professor (or other students who’ve taken the class) first. But, I had the exact same thing happen with my gen chem textbook. I got a used copy of the general version of the textbook for around $40 including shipping, instead of paying ~$150 on my school’s edition. The differences: The general version had some chapters that we didn’t cover; some chapters were in a different order; the cover was different. And that’s pretty much it. The chapter titles, content of the chapters, and practice problems were all the same, so it wasn’t even a big deal keeping up with the readings and practice despite my professors only giving information for the campus-specific version.
I think there was an option to get the custom textbook bundled with a lab notebook and the solutions manual. But I looked around and discovered I could buy each of those individually and it’d come out to around $80 including the textbook…and I think the custom bundle was around $200 when I took the series. So to me the decision was obvious. Again, double check first, but you’re most likely fine just getting the non-custom edition.
I would just get the cheap non-custom version. Every “custom” textbook I’ve ever need was the same as the regular textbook, but was missing the chapters not covered by my professor.
Custom textbooks are really just a way for publishers to make money as students can’t sell it online - only to other students in their school (and that’s only if the same professor will teach the class again).
Sometimes a custom bundle includes additional material. Professors sometimes have sets of lecture notes, there are lab manuals, additional handouts/readings, etc. Sometimes the course will have an online component, and the text is bundled with an access card.
And sometimes the textbook is a “special edition” with the schools name on the cover and 2 sections deleted because the professor doesn’t cover them. In such a case, it’s typically better to get the regular book. Make sure that the books are the same though.
Oddly, the Berkeley custom version of Stewart’s calculus book costs less than the generic version.
Custom books are almost always cheaper than the real thing. But it’s hard to resell the book since you aren’t (typically) going to find a buyer from a different school. And if the class requires an online access code, you won’t find too many buyers at your own school either.
The real version is much easier to sell after you finish the course, so you can usually get a better “net price” so to speak.
Yes, what @comfortablycurt said. Every time I’ve had to buy the book from the bookstore, it’s been because there has been an access card included. My school usually gives us the option of buying just the access code or the access code and the book. If this is not the case, and there is no access code, then it is probably just that the school has taken out a few chapters that will not be covered. So you should look into this more to see what the deal is, and then make a decision from there.
It’s worth pointing out that sometimes you do really need the school specific custom textbooks. I took a Western Civilization course a few semesters ago that used a textbook that was exclusive to the school. The book itself was identical to a book that was widely available. But this version was a custom printing that had additional discussion sections inserted into the chapters. We were required to write a couple paragraphs in response to each of these discussion sections, and we then discussed them first thing in each lecture.