Before every semester starts, I and many other college students need to buy textbooks for their new classes. There are many options for how to obtain your textbooks and these vary some by school. Below are some methods to help you save money and/or time finding your textbooks along with what I have found to work best for me.
1. See if your school has a program through which you can rent your textbooks. One of my friends pays a small fee along with her tuition in order to be able to borrow every textbook she needs for each semester. They are guaranteed to have the necessary textbooks and she can write in them as much as she wants as long as the books are still intact and legible when she returns them. She even has found that sometimes past users of the books have highlighted the most important parts.
2. Check out the textbooks your on campus bookstore has. At my school as a freshman you can sign up for a program to receive all of the books you need for the upcoming semester. No matter how many times you swap classes, when you go to pick up your box, they will have the books you need. You can also select whether you have a preference for new or used books. After your freshman year, you can still buy books from the store and have them gathered together for you, but you must pick out the specific books that you are buying. At any time in the first few weeks you can return some of your books if you have dropped the class for which they were needed. In my case buying books from the campus bookstore is a time and stress saver, but is far from the most frugal choice.
3. Rent your textbooks from an outside company. I'm sure there are multiple options out there. Basically you pay a much lower rate, keep your books for the semester, and then send them back when you are done. This seems like a good option if you don't expect to want your textbooks for future reference after the semester is over. Make sure that your books will arrive by the start of the semester, though.
4. Buy your textbooks used from an outside company. I have often found great deals. I have primarily used allbookstores.com, which compares prices from many different sites, and Amazon.com. As stated above, when you buy textbooks online, make sure that they will arrive in time. Often the least expensive shipping is supposed to have things arrive in 4-14 business days. If you send them to your home address, be sure that they will arrive before you head back to school. Another option is to send them to your school address, but if nobody is at your apartment to bring your books inside or the on-campus package center doesn't open until after you get back, you may want to avoid this option.
5. Ask your professor if an older edition of the book is acceptable. Sometimes not very much changes between books and you would learn the same material. Other times I've found that homework problems are completely changed or reordered and thus having an older edition might be more trouble than it is worth. But it never hurts to ask!
6. See if any of your friends or classmates have books for your future classes. There are also website and/or facebook pages set up to help students at the same school find books from each other. In this option, both students win! You get the book for a reduced price and your friend can sell the book without the hassle of posting it online and waiting for a buyer. Also, there are no shipping costs!
What works for me:
At my school buying from the campus bookstore is the most expensive option. Especially for my quite expensive math and science textbooks, I have been able to find much cheaper used textbooks from outside sources than the used textbooks offered at the school. Thus far I have always chosen to buy rather than rent my books. My theory is that it is possible that I could sell my books for approximately what I bought them for (or sometimes even more) or that I might want to keep them for future reference. For example, I learned a new programming language this semester and found one of my textbooks extremely helpful in giving brief descriptions of the syntax, which will be very useful for refreshing myself on it later.
In addition to buying used books for the financial benefit, I buy used books because I am more likely to read them. My first few semesters I had a few books that I bought new; they were only slightly more expensive than other options and I thought,"Why not?" Well the entire semester I was then focussed on keeping the books as nice as possible in case I wanted to resell them, rather than using them for how I could best learn from them. One of my textbooks hardly was read and my workbook was never written in (I wrote down my answers on loose leaf paper instead). Since then I have bought almost all of my textbooks used, and I have tried to stay away from ones in 'Like New' or maybe even 'Very Good' condition, as those in 'Good' condition tend to be worn enough that I'm not overly worried if a corner gets bent, but in good enough condition that the book is still in one piece and not marked up too much.
For a reference, here the costs of my books for this upcoming semester:
$510.60 - Buying new books from campus bookstore
$441.45 - Buying used books from campus bookstore (new books substituted when used unavailable)
$170.07 - What I paid by buying used and searching different websites (also one of my professors said that any of the 3 most recent editions would be fine, so I bought my book for less than $10, while the new book of the most recent edition cost about $150)
So compared to what I would have paid at the campus bookstore, I saved 66.7% off of new books!
In conclusion...
Find what works for you! Depending on what school you go to and what subjects you take classes in, your costs for books could vary a lot. Figure out whether new or used books are more conducive to your learning.
So what has your solution been? Are there some options that I left out?
No comments:
Post a Comment