How Much Do You Plan To Spend On Textbooks?

Every semester I'm surprised by the stupidity of book prices. It doesn't even matter how thin the book is, or the fact that it's used, chances are the school store (or at least my school store) will be overpriced and harsh to students with low incomes.

My family's been having an extremely hard time financially. The winter is killer, where even buying groceries becomes a "What can we afford/live without?" fest. I'm looking to save money at every turn and on as much as possible. Heck just this week at Borders I got a $27.99 book down to $8, but that's not the issue here.

Textbooks, as we all know, are important to the college experience. They're packed with info and pretty pictures and sometimes even have those pictures in color. Whether the book be thick or thin, old or new, or interesting or dull, chances are you'll pay more at the conventional bookstore than you'd want to spend.

This semester was a shocker. 18 books. Count 'em. That's a phenomenal pile for such a small person. When I saw how many books I was supposed to get, I nearly freaked. How could I possibly afford this? Then I remembered my favorite text-buying tactic: internet shopping.

If I got all used books at my school bookstore, it would have totaled $259.50. Getting all used books is very, very rare. Usually only a handful of books will be used by the time I get to them (and today's the first day, so there's definitely some competition, or else the bookstore lists a used price when they don't get used books). If I bought all the books new, it would've been $325.80. Yeah, it looks like buying used from the school bookstore helps, but not enough.

So I turned to the Internet. For most of them I found that Alibris.com had the best prices. Often books (like plays and fiction) were $1.99 plus shipping, and the actual textbooks were $12-$30. Comparing some of the prices of the school store and Alibris is pretty enlightening. Take "The Director at Work", for example. At the school store, it's $103 new or $77.25 used. I just checked. There's no used. On Alibris I found the same book for $12.55. I think you can excuse me if I don't feel like funding my own school store in favor of some extra bucks to buy the rest of my mountain of books.

Check out my other blog entry about buying textbooks online, or for some handy links that I might not be able to reproduce here.

http://www.progressiveu.org/123425-how-buy-textbooks-smart-way

Check out sites like the following, but also remember there are others that I don't have memorized that you can find in the other blog entry.
www.alibris.com
www.abebooks.com
www.ebay.com (be careful. Make sure you know whether it's an auction or "Buy it Now")
www.amazon.com
www.cheapesttextbooks.com (compiles a list finding the cheapest prices. Not always the most accurate search engine in my opinion)