Textbook Tips Thread

Student Lounge College Life
1

I wanted to start a thread of tips for college students by college students for purchasing textbooks at the cheapest prices.

A few things I do to ensure I’m getting the best price:

  1. Look up your courses on bncollege during the summer. Many professors will have communicated required texts to the bookstore by then.
  2. Take the ISBNs provided by the bookstore and search for them on Amazon and other booksellers to see if there's a better price out there. You can copy and paste the ISBN into Google manually. Also, I recently discovered Cheapest Textbooks, a web site that compares bookseller prices if provided with book title/author/ISBN.
  3. If you find another bookseller with a cheaper price (including shipping), ensure that it is a legit site. Many booksellers have reviews, and many of the less reputable sites have 1-2 star ratings.
  4. If your cheapest option needs time to ship, buy it up to a week before classes begin in case you need it the first week.
  5. Check the manufacturer's web site for cheaper prices. This helped me a lot when I bought access codes for Spanish courses for considerably less than what the bookstore charged.
  6. If you don't care about having physical books or your professor doesn't require them, consider getting eTextbooks. Many times you'll find the eTextbook is cheaper. I use Amazon and Vital Source for eTextbook purchases. Vital Source has saved me $20-$30 compared to bookstore prices.
  7. Buying from the bookstore is the best option whenever you have to return something.
  8. Personally, I go to class before I buy textbooks that are (a) eTexts, (b) fiction books/plays, or (c) available at cheapest price in the bookstore. I do this to make sure we'll actually need to use the books in class. Last year, I kept a book all semester that I didn't open once. In another class, I realized all of the small $7-$8 books I bought, which added up to $80, had texts that were available online. I returned all of them the next day and never had a problem in the course.

Anyone have anything to add?

2

My daughter said sometimes you can buy some ebooks in bundles for sequential classes that you know you need to take and save some $. The upperclassman at her school also said to wait until classes start before buying books because sometimes instructors change. The only exception is if you get an email from the prof with specific instructions before hand.

3

Also consider “points” and shipping (both cost and time) we have an Amazon prime account tied to an Amazone credit card so we get Amazon credit for purchaes on that credit card. I’m also on a quest to earn Amtrak points to pay for our next vacation and you can earn 4 points for every dollar spent if you go through their mall portal to ecampus.com you can combine this with their coupons and use any credit card. It’s worked well for us so far.

Keep in mind that depending the price it might be cheaper to purchase a new book and resell it than rent a used book.

4

Your school may also have an easy way to buy and sell books between students. My D at Cal relies heavily on Free & For Sale on Facebook. She has saved a ton of money on used, good condition books and made some money back selling. Always have at least one backup buyer in case the first buyer bails.

5

This may seem obvious but assuming you pass the class and you know you will not be needing the book again, many schools have a buyback program for books where you can sell the book. Can help to at least make some of the money back. Or just sell it somewhere else, I’m sure many of the bigger schools have Facebook groups dedicated to buying/selling things including books. Be careful though, as there are some courses where you use the same book you did for a previous course again. I find this to be most common with Math courses.