Cheap Textbooks

Each year around this time twenty year-olds across the world are registering for college classes in the fall. As if the tuition bills weren’t daunting enough, you also have the pleasure of buying the required reading materials, and also the “suggested” material. I can remember paying an average of $500 a semester on textbooks. But towards the end of my college career, it increased to between $700 and $1,000.

The Situation:

In the past few years, students have been paying an ever-increasing amount for textbooks. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal’s SmartMoney Magazine (Aug 2008), “book prices have climbed 33 percent since 2003 – double the rate of inflation.”

It seems irrational that college students pay what they do for textbooks. How do you justify spending $250 on a textbook when the cost of the course is $300+? Another grievance is with the requirement for the latest and greatest textbook. This year publishers release the13th edition, which costs $250, yet just last spring that same course used the 12th edition, which now sells for $150. What could possibly make the same book worth $100 more? So what does any money savvy twenty year-old do? Find a used copy.

Be Smarter Than the Average Scholar:

So here at TMM, we not only promote the importance of managing your money, but also the importance of saving it. Stop paying the college bookstore markup and find someone who took the class last semester. An alternative and potentially lucrative en devour might be to start a used book trade center on campus if there is not already one.

A Few Tips:

• Scope out the college bookstore for their prices and write down the ISBN – it is the textbook ID number that can be found near the barcode on the back of the book or inside the book where the printing and copyright information is found. Trust me, it will save you time and aggravation during your search. Nothing is worse than buying the wrong textbook.
• Check online for used copies. More often than not, you will find better deals. Abebooks.com and Amazon.com are popular places for college students to off-load their used textbooks.
• My personal favorite: check online for an international version of the textbook. These generally lack the hardcover, shiny pages and the full-color diagrams, but they are verbatim to the American version and I wish I had discovered them sooner. A $300 textbook in America could go for $50 international. Fish around for the good deals and look early.
• Spend wisely. Don’t be tempted to spend the money that you “saved” by getting used books on something else, like a new computer game. Instead, put the money into an emergency fund for those cram study sessions or for when you finally get tired of pizza and oodles of noodles.

Final Note:
Don’t destroy your books during the semester. Come next semester, you can resell the books that you don’t intend on keeping. There will always be someone to buy it if you price it right. Then recycle the earnings to your new textbook fund. You will be surprised how over the course of your college career you may come out ahead. Sometimes you can get lucky and sell it for more than you paid for it. I made $50 by the end of my senior year and managed to keep all of my important finance textbooks (the most expensive ones). Good deal.

~K

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