My son is a sophomore at OU and I asked him several times last year if there is somewhere in Norman that he can sell back some of the textbooks that he doesn’t plan on keeping. Time gets away from us and he’s never had a chance to find out. Do kids still sell back textbooks? If so, how and where? If it makes a difference his textbooks have always been purchased at the OU bookstore. Thanks!
@MansfieldTxMom There are several places to sell back textbooks. My preferred method is selling directly to other students. I typically try and do this to people I know, whether that be friends or classmates. There are also OU Student Facebook groups you can sell within. If those don’t work, you can sell back directly to the bookstore or other textbook shops, but you usually get a small fraction of cost you paid back.
As a word of warning, always make sure that you’re done with a textbook before selling it back! There are some textbooks (for example, the calculus book) that you use for multiple classes at OU. I have also kept two textbooks that I found personally useful that I wanted to have to reference moving forward, but of course this needs to be analyzed in the context of how much the book is worth and how much you anticipate referencing it.
Great advice woolscarves. There have been many times in my life that I have referred back to my old textbooks.
@Torveaux Do you still use any old textbooks? I know when I first started my career, my old chemical engineering textbooks were indispensable. Based on my personal experience, I would definitely tell students to save at least their “core” in-major textbooks. That was before the internet took off and you could look in Wikipedia for almost any obscure subject. I look at young engineers now and I think their first search for information is usually googling something and not opening up archaic textbooks. My own kids have never seen an encyclopedia before! I’m not so sure my advice is good anymore on keeping textbooks…there is a reason young employees call me a “dinosaur”.
In my experience, the texts have much more detail and context than most of what is easily located on the ‘web’. I, too, am a dinosaur, so I tend to refer back to texts. (in my case it is not anything as complex as Chem E, that is S1’s deal).