Cheap textbooks and other issues that interest college students blog » books

Cheap Microbiology Textbooks

Eugene Aronsky — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 06:40:01 +0000

tudents face many challenging situations when they decide to pursue a college education. Tons of planning and paperwork are all laid out and it can literally take weeks or even months to get to the point where they are actually ready to enroll in classes. The path is full of all sorts of hurdles for the student. After being accepted and getting enrolled in classes there are more challenges awaiting the eager student.

Micro and Nanoengineering of the Cell Microenvironment: Technologies and Applications

One of the most difficult challenges that students face is funding the purchase of course textbooks. It’s not so much that they are so difficult to find, but the difficulty lies in finding cheap textbooks. That can really be what presents the problem. With the current economic situation all prices are skyrocketing and obtaining a college education is certainly no exception. The price on required textbooks can be totally outrageous. It can put a huge strain on the student’s or parent’s proposed budget that is set for obtaining schooling necessities. Thankfully there is a resources available online where students can purchase affordable textbooks. This is a great relief for both the pocketbook and the budget.

One of the most expensive subjects to study is in the field of science. The required texts are generally very large and so are their adjoining price tags. But when you buy textbooks online the same texts are available at discount prices. Thankfully there are books from every science course. There are several cheap micro-Biology textbooks available from which to choose. For example check out the links to Khademhosseini’s Micro and Nanoengineering of the Cell Microenvironment: Technologies and Applications and Applications as well as Micro and Nano Technologies in Bioanalysis: Methods and Protocols (Methods in Molecular Biology). These titles are just two examples of the wide variety of cheap Micro Biology textbooks that are available for purchase.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr – A Book Review

Eugene Aronsky — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:34:11 +0000

When you see this book in the shelves, and you skim through it, you will be attracted to the caption at the back that says this book aims not to alarm you about the use of Internet, but it is also not intended to proclaim Internet as if to sing praises for its glory. Seeing how important the Internet is, I find no reason to antagonize today’s technology, but it is a good idea too to be aware of what these devices can do to us. “The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr gives a decently balanced view about the matter by tracing the history of books, reading, and technology. It also points out the developments including how maps and clocks were altered, our perspectives on the changes, and how our brains really are made of and how it works.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

To think that the Internet can make us more attention deficit is far from original and only an axiom. One of Carr’s (the author) main problems in this information era is that it has made it hard for people, even those educated ones to just sit down and read a book the conventional way.

Carr’s major criticism that is quite obvious in the title of the book is that, as our knowledge gets broader and readily accessible, it gets shallower, too. It means we do not have time and patience to stay with just one idea for long to thoroughly evaluate it. We are too restless to move to the next website like Facebook, Tweet, blog post and so on.

Arguing with Carr’s arguments is hard, but finally, he cannot really provide a solution to the problem. There is not a real criticism if a solution can not be provided. We can not simply discard the Internet and never use it again, and many people will not be happy about that even if that is possible. For those people who despise it really, a total collapse of civilization and a giant step backwards to the early times would be their best hope. Of course, that is a possibility that most of us can consider inconceivable at this time.

Maybe, Carr, like most people, overrates the true value of conventional book learning. From another perspective, reading is a simulated activity that promotes a particularly left brained and Aristotelian point of view. We could just consider the Internet as a portion of giving tribute to the computer age and we romanticize it slightly.

The Shallows gives some good point regarding the Internet. If you are an affectionate reader, the best cure to Carr’s warnings is to keep reading and net surfing balanced, which means we should not rely solely on the net. You can also listen to books on tape, which is a more healthy way of letting your brain absorb information.

One thing is clear. The Internet is able to distract and waste our time if we don’t use it intelligently. This, of course, has to be kept in our minds and the benefits of it. At least, the Shallows remind us of what we may lose when we are online.

Finding Good Books to Read

Eugene Aronsky — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:50:37 +0000

This is a guest post written by Bob Hartzell

Bob Hartzell went to college before book shopping was an option and is still in debt as a result. He currently writes for Master Degree Online.com and other alternative education options at the graduate level. He recently highlighted the top online masters in education schools & prograsm according to US News & World Report.

When I was an English major I went through the agonizing process that millions of other students have experienced and that spawned this website: I went down to the college bookstore and emptied my checking account buying books that were purely and simply an investment in a college degree. Most of them were a challenge to read, some of them were altogether too dense with paragraphs that landed like lead on my delicate undergraduate brain. Granted those that I got through contributed substantially to my education; they were on the whole a necessary labor and productive in their purpose when I bothered to invest the time they required.

But they changed my perspective on books and book buying radically. Every quarter (I got to buy text books three times a year) I was offended by the textbook price scam that continues today, and every quarter I was saddled with scholarly works that made English seem like a recently acquired language. The books I bought for my major were mostly historical works and I was in most cases years away from truly appreciating them as classics. So the very thing that drove me to declare a literary major became a burden – reading.

If 800 pound textbooks have become part of your college experience it might help to not lose sight of the fact that books come in all intellectual shapes, sizes and flavors. Google the word “books” and Amazon is in your face. Amazon does not own the book space. If you once read for pleasure and would like some entertaining reading on talented work, start with a visit to the venerable New York Times.

1.      The book page in the newspaper still publishes quality reviews and their staff has remarkable range. The NYT Sunday Review of Books, which is a multimedia extravaganza devoted to the printed word. Podcasts, reviews, criticism – and an assortment of soapboxes for commentary relevant and obscure. But the Sunday Review has a much wider range of entertainment than overwrought criticism, it’s a great place to learn about the up-and-comers, and about what the authors that are both famous AND good have been up to lately.

2.      If you’re a little more inclined to browse through a reading resource that is not as engaged with literary prestige, the Barnes & Noble Review does a good job of sorting through new works and offering articles about literary activities across the globe. There’s a lot of history to be found there as well, about writers and about their topics – historical or imaginary. Like every brick-and-mortar outlet for products in the dead-tree media, they’re hanging on with fingernails. But for the moment their review pages offer some quality viewing about entertaining reading.

3.      The New York Times book section is a separate cauldron of critics from the New York Times Review of Books, a biweekly publication that was founded independently of the newspaper and before long assumed a lofty position in the pantheon of Meaningful Book Reviews. For all of its importance it’s still a good resource for new highlights in the bookshelves along with a hefty dose of political and cultural commentary. Click on “current issue” to get to the book reviews, which is where you’ll find the fiction that is identified as such.

4.      The Atlantic Monthly, now the Atlantic, offers an assortment of discussions about printed works in their culture section. These reviews tend to be about books that focus on current events and other Matters of Import rather than literary efforts. If international affairs capture your interest this resource can inform you about a broad range of published works that you’ll never see on the display shelves at the local bookstore.   A little esoteric perhaps, but like every other dustbin you can often find something different. And if your printed environment is composed of mandatory texts, different is good.

What is an ISBN?

Olivier Hubert — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:58:58 +0000

Anyone who has ever looked at the back cover of a book has probably noticed the numbers above or below the bar code where it is written ISBN. What exactly do those numbers represent? Well, the ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a unique number that identifies almost every modern book. The ISBNs are managed by the ISO consortium under the standard ISO-2108. The number is 10 or 13 digits long, depending if the book was published before 2007 or not. Although most books have an ISBN, they are not required by law, except in some countries, to have one. Also, the ISBN was first implemented in 1970 so books published before that time do not have an ISBN.

How can an ISBN be of use to someone searching for books? Well since it uniquely identifies a book (or an edition of a book), it makes searching for one a lot easier. A vast majority of libraries reference books by their ISBN so if you are searching locally for a book, you can, for example, call all used books bookstores of your area and ask if they have that ISBN in stock. Using online search engines, entering the ISBN instead of the title or author really speeds up the search.

For reference:

So how exactly do book price comparison sites work anyways?

Olivier Hubert — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:45:53 +0000

This is a pretty interesting question, and the answer can be applied to any type of site that claims to compare prices. After all, all sites that successfully compare prices have to work on the same basic principle, if they do not, then they do not really work.

Every book aimed for large scale distribution is printed hundreds of thousands, or even millions of times. In each printing (or edition), a book is marked with a number, an ISBN. This is either a 10 or 13 digits number that identifies this book, and that can then be used to search for this book in databases, or to compare the price of book “A” with book “B” and you can be sure that if two books have the same ISBN than they are the same book. So the best way to make sure you are buying the good book is by verifying its ISBN.

It is at this point that we come in. In the past it was difficult to compare prices because you had to go from store to store, but the Internet has allowed for increased transparency, putting power into the hands of the smart consumer. Of course, the seller or store needs some kind of online presence and an online catalog of books for search engines to work.

Given that books are sold at different websites by different sellers at different prices the book price comparison engine searches through the largest bookstores on the web, to find you the best deal on the book you want. There are two steps involved in this: the search and the comparison.

The search is exactly what it sounds like. A request is sent to each and every bookstore for books that match the search criteria entered by the user. Let’s say you want a book on “statistical business analysis”. A request is sent to bookstores to give a list of “statistical business analysis”, or with “statistical business analysis” as the subject. Every bookstore then returns a list of books (or none if none is found). The search engine will then order these results according to an algorithm; for example a book titled “The analysis of quarterly results’ statistical data – Business” will be lower in the list than a book titled “Statistical Business Analysis applied to real-life scenarios” because the second book’s title matches exactly the search criteria. Once sorted, the results are displayed to the user.

Once the user picks a book to get the best prices for it, the second step, the comparison, begins. A request is sent to all bookstores for the current price, availability and shipping price for a given book. The results are then sorted according to total price and the result is displayed to the users.

So why are there so many different book price comparison websites? The difference is in the details. Some might be very fast, but they search and compare using internal databases instead of live data, something that might turn out to be a problem. Indeed, since the price and availability of books sometimes fluctuate wildly, using information a few days, or even a week old, might mean inaccurate results. You should always use engines that fetch live data as it is guaranteed to be the most accurate; it is true they are a bit slower but waiting those few seconds more might save you a lot of trouble.

Other search engines will display a lot of details when what you really want is the book. At We Compare Books we aim at simplicity. Just search for a book, click on it to compare prices and you are ready to buy it. Three mouse clicks is all you need to find the best price.

An example of result you get with We Compare Book

If the user would like to see all prices for bookstores that currently have the book, simply clicking on the “Check full comparison report” link will bring up a list of all bookstores and their price for the book. Sometimes you might want to buy from a particular bookstore for a variety of reasons; by looking at the list you can quickly decide if it’s more important to buy from that bookstore or to buy for the lowest priced one.