When you’re going to college, the very first thing that you’ll be interested in finding is beer. Once you’ve had your fill of that, then you’ll start thinking more sensibly and start looking for cheap school books. The fact is, some semesters, you might end up spending over a thousand dollars just on books, and that’s not a good thing.
Where Not to Find Cheap School Books
The biggest mistake that most college students do is they try to purchase their school books through the University book store. Most students assume that if they get there early enough and get the bulk of their books used that they will get the best possible deal, but this is rarely the case. The fact is, even used books are far from being cheap school books.
Another misconception from students is to try Amazon, which, admittedly, does work really well if you order the books right away, although their return policy doesn’t help you all that much if you buy the book too soon, and then watch your class get cancelled.
Cheap School Book Sources
If you can find a few good buddies at college, and you end up in many of the same classes as they are in, you can sometimes set up a time-sharing system where everyone buys a small percent of the books, and then you share. This can sometimes causes a few inconveniences prior to tests, but it’s not a bad way to do things if you can manage this.
Used book stores are places where lots of students turn to sell their old school books because they typically get a better cash offer from them than they’d get from the on-campus bookstore. If your school is in a metropolitan area, it’s often worth a look at some local stores to find some cheap school books.
Libraries often give you access to books for free. You’d probably be surprised at how many class textbooks they have.
If you’re intent on buying all of your school books, think about buying older editions. Book publishers often release new versions of older books every year in order to sell more new copies. What they don’t tell, you though, is that the difference between the 9th and 10th edition is simply a different cover, a few different pictures, and a re-organized appendix.
How to Get The Best Deals on Cheap School Books
The ideal situation for school textbooks is to buy them from your bookstore and speed read them. If you use some of the speed reading tips and techniques on this site, you can read them quickly, with high retention, and need only minimal studying to finish the class exams. Alternatively, you could go to Kinko’s or an Office Max and photocopy just the pages you need from your syllabus. Then, if you can get through them before the return deadline, you can usually get full price back for them. This is a terrible solution for classes like Math and Computer Programming, where you need the examples in the book to do projects, but for Literature classes, Social Studies and Humanities courses, this is a great way to go about preparing for the semester.
Also, remember that local libraries will rent out many of your common textbooks, or at least books that are similar enough that you can still use them. Any ancient texts, like bibles, Plato, Shakespeare and Aristotle, will be available for free online (in fact, anything over 100 years old should be easily found on Google). These are, of course, completely free, and therefore one of the best sources for cheap school books.
Hopefully this gives you a few good ideas on how to get cheap school books.