electronic textbooks?

<p>Hi guys! I'm hoping to avoid the extremely pricey (not to mention heavy) textbooks that any college student must budget for. I was thinking that a e-books would be a great solution. I'm planning on going to school with an ipad and I was wondering if I will be able to get most textbooks that I'll need as ebooks that are available on the ipad. If anyone knows the answer or has previous experience using an ipad with textbooks, I would really appreciate any advice. Thanks so much!</p>

<p>ipad has +'s and -'s, I find I can’t read or stare at the screen for that long and sometimes it’s nice to have a textbook to physically flip through. There are usually ebooks nowadays, but I think the best way to save cash is to 1) Borrow books from the library - so many quarters I only bought a 10 dollar book because my texts or older versions were in the stacks 2) buy USED (amazon, half, etc.) and 3) resell.</p>

<p>hey thanks for the reply! I’m definitely weighing the options (especially the idea of staring at a screen for a long time). Are all/most of textbooks needed for classes available for the ipad? I definitely am planning on using books from the library, but if I can have all my textbooks consolidated to one device, I think it would help me out a lot. thanks for the help!!</p>

<p>I have ebooks for half my textbooks but I find it VERY inconvenient using them. It’s very annoying if you want to flip back and forth different pages and you cannot mark them too. However they’re great in situations like when you go home for the weekend and don’t want to bring your textbooks with you.</p>

<p>I mean, yes, you can probably find formats for most texts (ebooks in proprietary or PDF format) that you can load to the iPad. I used one or two when it was cheaper to get it, or I wanted an electronic version that allowed fast searching (open book exams or a lot of dense reading where I wanted to be able to go back to certain sections quickly).</p>

<p>a lot of textbooks are available (illegally) as djvu’s</p>

<p>I would say get the physical copy. I remember I used to have a digital copy of my physics book for the first week of class. I found it was really inconvenient when I wanted to check the equations page, or look at glossary/index/etc… I just gave in bought the books.</p>

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Prices are rather low, for the most part, and since you’re dealing with people on campus, you don’t have to pay for shipping.</p>

<p>Another plus is that you can sell the books later and re-coop some of your losses. (Sometimes, if the going rate is high enough, you might even be able to sell your book for a profit, even if you list the lowest price…)</p>

<p>I agree that e-books aren’t ideal, but they can be useful if you’re not sure whether you’re going to keep the class.</p>