Anyone know a good site for cheap textbooks?

J

jah_warrior28

CAGiversary!
With classes starting right around the corner I will be needing to buy textbooks and the campus store is a rip off and the other places in town aren't much better. Thanks for any help you guys can give me.
 
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Business books are generally much cheaper in England (most books are I guess). I order from Amazon.co.uk a lot. I just got an accounting book for $90 USD that is $150+ everywhere here in the US.
 
when I was attending a community college during the summer.

this person gave me a book mark telling me about www.screwbookprices.com

cuz you know how usually students only need their new bought book for a semester? and the college book stores try to rip you off by first selling the book like $5-10 more expensive, then only pay you for half price when you sell the book back?

those faygets.

I think www.screwbookprices.com is only for california right now though..
 
Buy the international versions. They often have crappier paper and aren't hard bound, but they cost about 10% of the normal versions.
 
http://campusi.com/...it's probably the best website around for textbooks (sorta like pricegrabber). I highly recommend it.
 
[quote name='Tromack']Buy the international versions. They often have crappier paper and aren't hard bound, but they cost about 10% of the normal versions.[/QUOTE]

Some of the problems are not the same but other then that everything else is the same.
 
I use campusi for price comparison, but end up buying my books from half.com.

International is good if you can know ahead whether the problems and questions are the same as the US ones. However, if you buy international ones you should know that bookstores do not buy those back.
 
addall.com

firstandsecond.com -- search for specially priced indian versions only(paperbacks)
 
Here's another trick I picked up. Get the earlier version on the book, like say your class is using the 6th edition, get on Amazon or Half and find the 5th edition. Very, VERY rarley is there ANYTHING different about the book execpt maybe pictures or stupid crap like outlining colors or font. I've been doing it for the last 2 and 1/2 years I actually had 3 or 4 profs. tell the entire class to do it, and I have never had a problem. The worst thing Ive ever had happen was my ECON book was a chapter off, so if the class was on chapter 5 my book was on chapter 4, the publisher just moved chapter 7 in my book to chapter 2 in the new book. It sounds crazy but give it a shot, SAVE BIG MONEY (Ex: Business Cal. book 7th edition was $56 bucks, I got the 6th ed. for 4.50 closeout, EVERYTHING WAS THE SAME)
 
That is great advice hx214.

I just checked out the prices for the books that I need and they were only like a few bucks lower than at school. I'm going to search again using your advise. Thanks.

Edit: I remember doing that last year and I got a book for $15 compared to the $60 that school was selling. I can't believe I forgot about it.
 
Use campusi.com to search, it will check just about everywhere including half.com, which is usually the cheapest. Very new releases usually are not much cheaper than the school bookstore though, since there are very few if any used copies floating around. In this case, go with an older edition if you can. Make sure to resell your books somewhere other than the bookstore too, I've been able to pretty much break even on my books and in some cases even made a profit on them after using them for the year.
 
and now time to bump this, as it's time to sell back those textbooks... I'm trying to find a site that buys older editions, and well none of them do, I'd really hate to take a loss of a couple hundred dollars on books that are listed around $100 on certain websites yet none of them will buy them back now

I'm thinking I'm just screwed on this deal, but I figured maybe one of you had some tricks or something
 
[quote name='hx214']Here's another trick I picked up. Get the earlier version on the book, like say your class is using the 6th edition, get on Amazon or Half and find the 5th edition. Very, VERY rarley is there ANYTHING different about the book execpt maybe pictures or stupid crap like outlining colors or font. I've been doing it for the last 2 and 1/2 years I actually had 3 or 4 profs. tell the entire class to do it, and I have never had a problem. The worst thing Ive ever had happen was my ECON book was a chapter off, so if the class was on chapter 5 my book was on chapter 4, the publisher just moved chapter 7 in my book to chapter 2 in the new book. It sounds crazy but give it a shot, SAVE BIG MONEY (Ex: Business Cal. book 7th edition was $56 bucks, I got the 6th ed. for 4.50 closeout, EVERYTHING WAS THE SAME)[/QUOTE]

Insanely good advice! There are only a few rare times where the new edition of a textbook is so above and beyond the previous versions that buying the older version hurts far more than it helps. For example, the new version of the Norton Anthology of Western Music (Volumes I and II). They are easily worth the price of admission for each due to the fact that those books now tie historical events to the evolution of western music, making very important ties between material that never existed in the previous versions. Top notch quality all the way!

Otherwise...ugh, there are too many textbooks where the new version fixes nine typos and a sentence and people expect you to pay an extra $40. Not likely.
 
[quote name='hx214']Here's another trick I picked up. Get the earlier version on the book, like say your class is using the 6th edition, get on Amazon or Half and find the 5th edition. Very, VERY rarley is there ANYTHING different about the book execpt maybe pictures or stupid crap like outlining colors or font. I've been doing it for the last 2 and 1/2 years I actually had 3 or 4 profs. tell the entire class to do it, and I have never had a problem. The worst thing Ive ever had happen was my ECON book was a chapter off, so if the class was on chapter 5 my book was on chapter 4, the publisher just moved chapter 7 in my book to chapter 2 in the new book. It sounds crazy but give it a shot, SAVE BIG MONEY (Ex: Business Cal. book 7th edition was $56 bucks, I got the 6th ed. for 4.50 closeout, EVERYTHING WAS THE SAME)[/QUOTE]

Very true, I needed two books for my biology class last semester and one was $80 and the other was $40. I then went to the flea market and found the last two editions for buck each. When I compared them to the newer editions they were practilly the same.
 
My teacher uses an older version than the students, it's fucked up.

I spent like $600 last year on books. So far this year... $32. I just stopped buying the damn things. Most of the time the lybrary has them, or something close.
 
Go to the bookstore at your school right before the end of the semester. There is normally a table set up for book buy backs where other students are going to get ripped off. Stand right beside the table adn when you see a book you want, offer a dollar or two more than the buyback people do.
 
i wouldnt buy used books until you knew what your teacher wanted.... sometimes you might find a cheap book just to find out that its missing a CD rom meaning that you will not be able to sell it back
 
[quote name='doodle777_98']www.campusi.com

searches a ton of palces for ya. i get my books real cheap there.[/QUOTE]

I second the nomination. I've bought all my books through campusi.com the past 2 years and I haven't had any problems. Great site which has saved me lots of money.
 
Ok, here is my advice. It may not be legal, moral, or ethical, so take it with a grain of salt. This is what I did for most of my college years, when I was too broke ass to even really afford textbooks.

Don't buy the books until after your first class and you get a class syllabus. Then you will know which books are essential. Get together with people you know in that class, and pool your money together. Buy one copy of each book you need. Take everybody down to the local printer/Kinko's and make photocopies of the book chapters you need. Problem solved, for the most part, I found it cheaper to photocopy an entire book, and if I felt like being really fancy about it, having it bound into a notebook at the copy center (even then I would still often come out ahead by 50% at least). And if you were a really super cheap ass like me, you would scout your local library FIRST to see if there was a copy of textbook available for checkout before you even hit the bookstore.

Eventually I met up with four other people who were in the same major as I was in, and we almost always had the same class schedule together. We did this for at least 2 years until college was over. We must have saved thousands of dollars in the process.

How did we come up with this idea? We noticed that many of our textbooks, the professor would only use part of the book's contents, not the whole thing. It was frustrating beyond belief to have to pay out the ass for a book that we might only read one or two chapters in. We figured that if we pooled our money, and photocopied what we needed, we would save money. AND IT WORKED.

Edit: I should also add, when I went to college, there was no such thing as ebay, textbooks.com, amazon or barnes and noble. So there was very few options available then.
 
[quote name='Spacepest'] And if you were a really super cheap ass like me, you would scout your local library FIRST to see if there was a copy of textbook available for checkout before you even hit the bookstore.
[/QUOTE]

I agree, I did this all through graduate school. While other people were paying $75+ per book (several books per class), I was walking over to the library and checking them out. Usually, if your school library doesn't have the book then they can get it on inter-library loan for you. I would usually email my professors early to get the book titles so I could beat out anyone else who had the same idea. I've heard of some schools having an agreement with the bookstore to not have textbooks in their stacks, but those are usually community colleges.

If you don't think this will work then here's a story: When I was in grad school I taught an intro lecture class that had over 100 students in it. Two of my fellow graduate students taught other sections of the same class. Therefore, 300+ students had to buy the same textbook. For laughs I used to see if the 1 copy of the text in the school library was checked out, it never was.
 
Now that school is starting back up again I thought this topic could use a new message. I would like to thank those who posted the campusi website. I'm taking a night class and found the $115 text for $25.

UMC
 
campusi works well, my roomie used em last quarter.

There's also a site I personally discovered, biblio, with a really nice textbook searching feature. I signed them up to advertise on my webpage through linkconnector because I found two of my books dirt cheap through their search. Waiting for my last set of booklists before I order, then I can give a service update.

If you want to help a cager out you can go through my website

http://www.collegegamer.org and click in the upper right hand link

or just head to http://www.biblio.com

sigh, going back to school...
 
[quote name='Spacepest']

How did we come up with this idea? We noticed that many of our textbooks, the professor would only use part of the book's contents, not the whole thing. It was frustrating beyond belief to have to pay out the ass for a book that we might only read one or two chapters in. We figured that if we pooled our money, and photocopied what we needed, we would save money. AND IT WORKED.
[/QUOTE]


True. I just spent $100 on a book for basic chemsitry when I could've went to online resources for topics we covered in class.
 
I spent $800 last semester for books... now I have to sell a bunch of those and buy new ones, hopefully, I do better this time.:)

What's the best method to sell back books though?
 
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