How not to spend $935 a year on textbooks
Posted
Dec 10 2007, 12:35 PM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
A real frugalist just hates to pay retail. I need five books for next quarter's university classes. They’d have cost $91.23 at the university bookstore. I paid $27.20 because I went shopping on the Internet. (That price included shipping.)
All you college students: Start looking now for next quarter’s books. Don’t wait until January, and don’t buy them at the university bookstore if you can possibly avoid it.
Yes, I know you’re slogging toward or through finals week. But you stand to save a bundle if you go online. According to the College Board, which tracks higher-education costs, the average amount spent on course materials at four-year colleges is $935 per year.
A little work for potentially big savings
I got off easily for the coming quarter. Not for me those weighty premed or chemistry tomes. All I needed was three novels and two nonfiction works. Luckily, the trio of Spanish texts ("Lengua," "Literatura," "Cultura") that I bought last year are good for one more course.
They better be: I paid $257 plus tax for those rascals.
Novels and classic literature can generally be found cheaply online, unless they're really obscure. But deeply discounted textbooks can be had, too. An MSN article noted that a new copy of a $136 calculus book sold for $64 at half.ebay.com.
Buying your books online isn’t foolproof, though. You may need a specific edition, if your professor is picky about that sort of thing. But some teachers are as irritated as students are by the high price of textbooks and are willing to be flexible. My math teacher let me get away with a previous year's edition ($35, bought from a fellow student) instead of the newest one (more than $90 at the campus bookstore). Shoot an e-mail to your instructor just to be sure.
You’ll also want to check the seller’s return policy just in case you drop the class. And sometimes you need more than one item -- for example, a registration code for online assignments -- so be sure you're getting everything the course requires. A cheap book is not much of a deal if the seller didn't include, say, the software that originally went with it.
Where to start?
Students still do buy and sell texts with cards thumbtacked to hallway bulletin boards. But they’re just as likely to use Facebook or any number of Internet sites, a number of them specifically for discounted textbooks. Some of these sites even pay the postage upfront.
An article from the Frugal Panda site offers “17 ways to get free books,” ranging from printable databases of public domain works to book-exchange groups whose members give away or trade titles. I expect the latter would come in especially handy for literature or cultural studies majors -- in time, some college grads are going to purge their shelves of titles like “Borderlands/La Frontera” or “The American Literature Review.”
Here are a few more suggestions to get you started:
Happy hunting, and enjoy the winter break. I’m going to sleep until 8:30 a.m. most days, myself.
