In recent decades the cost of a college education has had an astonishing annual rate of growth, this rate far exceeds that of inflation and is even greater than that of health care! What is worse, the value of a college education has steadily decreased in recent decades, where once a college degree meant that you could find a well paying job that would allow you to have a nice house, raise a family… today, most college grads are lucky to find a job, and those that get a job are lucky if they are able to pay off their student loans by age 40! Despite this, for most of us a college education is still a necessity, and we must therefore try to find ways to make college more affordable. Given that students do not have the power to negotiate their tuition, technology fees, dorm costs… students must look for other places where to save money, and one of the easiest places for a student to save a ton of money is by locating affordable textbooks

Save money on textbooks by shopping online

finding cheap textbooks is often more of an art rather than a science, there are many tricks to do this, you can buy books directly from students who took the course during the last semester, or you can agree to share a textbook with a friend who will be taking the course with you. (University libraries will often allow you to borrow any textbook from the library of another university, and this is a great way to get free textbooks!) But the best way to get cheap textbooks still remains shopping online, doing your research and buying your books early (often before the start of the semester if you are looking to get the best deals).

When it comes to going online to buy your books, there are many online bookstores that sell new and used books, and often they compete with each other to have the lowest price, additionally many of these stores allow individuals to sell their used books for any price, so you are likely to see a large price difference on almost every book when looking at different sites. In order to find the best prices you have a few options, you can go to each online bookstore manually, and compare prices by hand, or you can use a textbook price comparison service that will compare prices at the largest bookstores on the web and will give you the best price on any book.

When it comes to timing and buying your books early, there are a few reasons for this, the first is b/c shipping takes time, and you want to have your books as early as possible to do the work. But the bigger reason (at least when it comes to the price question) is b/c you are not the only student looking for cheap textbooks and the cheapest books are typically gone very early in the semester.

Anyway, these are just a few thoughts I had about finding cheap textbooks, if you know of any other tricks to getting a deal on books that I did not discuss please mention it as a comment below.

Every college student hopes to have professors that will choose either free or at least cheap textbooks. Unfortunately those are rare, and many professors simply do not care that the book that they are selecting for the class will cost $200, while in other cases they simply do not have a choice since that may be the only good book on the subject. We already discussed some of the mechanics of textbook pricing and college bookstores. Today I give you a few tricks on how to get cheap textbooks. Some of these tricks are well known, and often used, others are only known to a few, and this fact will enable you to take full advantage of these tricks.

In regards to cheap textbooks many of the tricks have already been covered in previous blog posts, that is: used textbooks, older editions, etc. The trick I want to discuss with you today is how to find ways to avoid buying books altogether, while still having access to the contents of the books. The classic solution to this problem is simple: find a friend in the same class and share the textbook. Unfortunately this is not always possible, and when it is the friend may want you to help pay for part of the book, something completely understandable and a much better deal than having to pay the full price.

Another idea to keep in mind is that school libraries, or department libraries, typically keep copies of every textbook in reserve (this means that you cannot take them out of the building). This means that if you do not mind doing all of your studying at the library, than you do not need to buy the textbook. The downside to this is that you cannot take notes in the book, but you can always make copies of pages, and depending on the subject that may be good enough.

Another much less known trick is that most university libraries in the United States participate in some type of EZ borrow program. This means that they share books with other university libraries and are able to request books from other schools. This is great because you can request your textbooks from another university library, sign them out and bring them home. Depending on your library’s load duration, you will probably have to renew them mid semester, but that is not a problem. You will still not be able to take notes in the book (and out of respect for other students, please abstain from doing so), but at least this way you can read the book in the comfort of your home. This is a little known scheme, but trust me it works great! I had a good friend who went all through graduate school never having to purchase a single textbook.

This last trick applies to all of you out there who took humanities majors, or who are being forced to take litterature, philosophy or history classes. Many of your books, particularly novels are available in the public domain online: all you have to do is search for the name of the book and add “ull text” and if you are lucky it will be right there.

Well I hope that this blog post has given you some ideas as to how to avoid buying books, stay tuned for other postings where I will give you even more ideas on this and other book related issues. If you have tricks or ideas you would like to share, please leave a comment.