Save Money When Buying Textbooks

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.

Reading books - for fun?

When I was little, I loved to read.  I read all types of books, but my favorites as a child were mysteries.  My mom would taken my brother and me to the library often, and we could choose from lots of new and interesting books.  I even knew that the limit to the number of books we could check out from the public library was 99 (not that we ever reached that number).  When I got home from school, I would read.  If my brother was bothering me, I could always lose myself in a good book.  In the summer, we would both participate in the summer reading challenge held by the library and get prizes for how many books or hours we read.

And then high school happened.  And with high school came more school work and more extracurricular activities.  I was taking harder classes and reading more for school.  After school I would go to practice for whichever sport I was participating in that season: soccer, basketball, cross-country, or indoor track.  And once a week I would go to youth group after a long day of school and sports practice.  With all the time I was spending school and other things, I did not have much time left over for reading for pleasure.  But when summer came around, I would be reading a lot again.  My family has always taken books to the beach so that we can read and relax on the beach.  One summer I recall averaging about a book a day, at least for the first half of the week.