The Pain. The Agony. The Price.
Plan ahead to save money on textbooks.
Textbooks are a necessary "evil" when it comes to your college expenses. While essential (usually), there are many ways to reduce the burden to your budget. With the start of school just around the corner, a little work now can reap big savings.
The biggest money saver is to purchase your books used. For expensive books, savings of over 50% are common.
The most convenient way to get your textbooks is, of course, from the campus bookstore; for the community colleges in Hampton Roads, that means the Follett bookstore on campus. Unfortunately, because of the contract they have with the college, they are likely to be the most expensive choice.
In some cases, like certain scholarships or grants, the bookstore is your only option.
The biggest factor in looking at alternative sources for textbooks is making sure you get the right book. It's not difficult. For the last 30 years, every edition of every commercially published book has had a unique ISBN (International Standards Book Number). This is a ten-digit number and it usually appears above the bar code on the book, and on the copyright page as well.
Since Follett went under inquiry in the Virginia legislature a couple years ago regarding their sales and pricing policies, they now post the ISBN numbers on their site efollett.com. This makes comparing prices a snap. Just go to their site, efollett.com, and look up your classes to find the book requirements.
To be sure that the book you purchase is actually the right book, contact the professor of the class you are enrolling in to make sure he or she will still be using the same textbook since sometimes the list Follett has isn't current. (If the instructor is listed as "TBA" contact the department head.) Quite likely, the professor can tell you the ISBN as well as the title, author and edition.
Then, to really save some money, check out the web and shop from home. The best sites let you search by ISBN and several of them let you enter more than one ISBN at a time, which saves time if you're buying books for more than one course. Usually, when entering ISBNs into search boxes, you leave out the hyphens and just enter the ten digits.
Some of the biggest retailers also sell textbooks, and their prices for new books aren't much better than the campus bookstore. However, Amazon is an exception and has used book section with some great deals to be had.
An alternative to manually searching several sites is to use a price search site such as: campusbooks.com. It displays the results from many different sites and includes the book price and the shipping price.
When buying online pay attention to shipping charges and the shipping method. If you plan ahead, media mail rate will save you the most money, but it may take up to two weeks for your book to arrive. First class costs a bit more and isn't so bad, but paying to have something shipped overnight really defeats the purpose of buying a used book online, as the booksellers, if they even offer overnight shipping will rook you for sure.
Another source is online auctions like eBay™. eBay™ owns half.com, so they work much in the same way, though searching on eBay™ isn't as efficient and doesn't seem to be included in the book search engine results.
For textbooks that you won't need in the future, keep in mind that most of the sources that sell used books also buy them. Before you accept $22 from Follett for a book that they will re-sell for $74, consider selling online or even stand outside the classroom door on the first day of school and offer your book to students at a price somewhere between.
If you buy used and then resell your textbooks your actual cost can be close to nothing. Just because you have to buy textbooks doesn't mean you have to go broke doing it.
For purposes of comparison several websites were tested using a biology textbook and public speaking handbook.
Website |
Bio Textbook: Human Body in Health & Disease ISBN 0138568162 |
Public Speaking Handbook ISBN 0205420591 |
| Abebooks.com | $15 + $3.50 S/H = $18.50 |
$20.00 + $3.50 S/H = $23.50 |
| Amazon.com | $15 + $3.49 S/H = $18.49 |
$24 + $3.49 S/H = $27.49 |
| Half.com | $25 + $3.25 S/H = $28.25 |
Used $20.00 + $3.25 S/H = $23.25 |
| Valorebooks.com | $31.90 + $3.49 S/H = $35.39 |
Used $37.70 + $3.49 S/H = $41.19 |
| Efollett.com | New $73.50; used $55.25 |
New $65.25; used $49.00 |
| TextbookX.com | $15 + $5.78 S/H = $25.78 |
Used 37.70 + $5.78 S/H = 43.48 |
Compare sites carefully, they don't always have the lowest price on all items. Carpe diem!
Next Semester...
If you think ahead toward next semester there are other options available: One is to park yourself outside the classroom where the course is currently being taught and offer to buy a used book from the students as they exit. This technique is a bit tricky because most students aren't going to part with their book before the final, and most students don't bring the book with them when taking the final exam. A good solution to this is to make a flyer with the course name and number, the title of the book along with your name and phone number and hand it to the exiting students.
It's a good idea to have an amount you are willing to pay in mind, and perhaps put it on your flyer. Generally, half of the bookstore price for new is considered reasonable.
Another option is to put a flyer up on the bulletin board listing the books you are interested in purchasing. This would definitely be something you'd want to do before the end of term, because once students finish their finals they won't be back until January. You can also browse the bulletin boards looking for textbooks for sale.
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