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.
