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College Text Books

C

Carbo

Diamond Member
My daughter needs a few text books for the upcoming semester. So dear ol' dad gets the call. That's fine and well. But, damn, prices are expensive! So I start shopping around and I'm wondering where the cool intellectuals who hand on ATOT buy their text books?
As I search online I'm seeing prices that are all over the place. Some too good to be true, which raises red flags.
For example, has anyone done business with Abe Books? Their price for one science text book is almost 50% for a new book, than the school book store is charging for a used book.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
 
Amazon.com

more specifically, get used books from amazon.com.

You can get incredible deals on used books that are in almost new condition. Just make sure you find someone with alot of reviews, and make sure they aren't selling the "international" version of the book (it will say in the description)
 
i don't buy my textbooks, but still manage to do well 😉

edit: nothing wrong with international editions.
 
Originally posted by: cirthix
i don't buy my textbooks, but still manage to do well 😉

edit: nothing wrong with international editions.
Click to expand...

The international editions vary. Usually they are soft-cover and black & white with no extras. Sometimes they go as far as to strip out photos and stuff from them. I've also gotten one before that page numbers didn't match up to the normal book, so when the prof told you to turn to places you had to hunt around to figure out what exactly you were supposed to be looking at.
 
Yeah, I was wondering what the story is with International Editions. I noticed they are a hell of a lot cheaper than the US editions. I figured there had to be a catch.
I checked Amazon and was surprised that their prices for used books were only a few dollars less than the school book store. No bargains there, at least for the titles I'm looking for.
 
Originally posted by: CraKaJaX
I actually have a new record high this semester of $154 for a single book.
Click to expand...
For that kind of money I assume the answers to the final are included?

 
Originally posted by: Carbo
Originally posted by: CraKaJaX
I actually have a new record high this semester of $154 for a single book.
Click to expand...
For that kind of money I assume the answers to the final are included?
Click to expand...

Sadly, no. However, all exams are open book closed notes. 😛
 
Originally posted by: CraKaJaX
I actually have a new record high this semester of $154 for a single book.
Click to expand...

jeebus

most ive had to pay so far for a new one was $110. came with an office 2007 trial and a 1gb flash drive. and you could kill someone with the book if you had to.

mostly i buy used from amazon or somewhere. i bought my cisco books new because theyre not that pricey at $45 or so each.
 
I ended up getting most of mine on amazon and ebay.

I also saved a lot of money buying out-dated editions... as an english lit major, not much ever really changes except stupid stuff like print formatting, the type of paper they use, etc, and even a book that was one edition old could be had for dirt cheap.
 
I tend to use Fetchbook to find my texts for engineering. You can search by ISBN and they will go looking on all of the Amazon Marketplaces, Abebooks, eBay, etc. Sometimes they don't get all the matches on eBay though (because of international editions), so I like to go on there and just search for the title/author.

On international editions, these are the SAME book as the north american edition but usually paperback. Make sure you get the ones with the colour printing not the cheap black and white though. Most of them are in colour though. The difference is the price.. International editions are HALF the price of the NA ones or better. For instance, my Heat Transfer text at the school book store was $170 CDN + tax, I paid $55 US (or about $70 CDN) shipped, no tax.

Hope that helps.
 
ADDALL.COM has been my gold standard for searching, I usually end up buying at amazon or half.com. Sometimes search ebay for books that aren't discounted much
 
Books.addall.com is a good search engine for used books.

I got my thermodynamics textbook from abebooks.com for $37 as a new international edition. A new US edition would have run me $92, and the used books were not much cheaper.
 
I managed to get all my books for $120 which happens to be less than the cost of my physics book used at the university book store.

gotta love amazon.com used books.
 
Law school textbooks change editions just about every year, but looking at the old one is usually a good idea. For most of my securities reg coursework, for instance, I used the prior edition and the pages still lined up for the most part. One or two newer cases would sometimes be missing, so you'd just have to read the unedited version off of Westlaw. For the one time that happened (Tellabs), we got to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court, so that took care of that 🙂
 
So far, I've spent over $600 for books and working papers this semester. I already had one textbook (for part 2 of a class) and still need one book for a class I'm waitlisted for. (this semester, $168 was the most expensive textbook/package of crap I had to buy, plus 62 for the working papers)

Have you checked Craigslist for the books your daughter needs? I LIKE buying used textbooks from other students. It makes them a bit more money than they get from the school's buy-back program, (the rip-off pricks) and saves me a bit.

Fortunately, I don't have to pay for my books...my voc-rehab program does...and when I do buy a book anywhere but the campus bookstore, it's out of my pocket and takes a couple of months to get reimbursed. (I still do it occasionally though.)
 
Originally posted by: BoomerD
So far, I've spent over $600 for books and working papers this semester. I already had one textbook (for part 2 of a class) and still need one book for a class I'm waitlisted for. (this semester, $168 was the most expensive textbook/package of crap I had to buy, plus 62 for the working papers)

Have you checked Craigslist for the books your daughter needs? I LIKE buying used textbooks from other students. It makes them a bit more money than they get from the school's buy-back program, (the rip-off pricks) and saves me a bit.

Fortunately, I don't have to pay for my books...my voc-rehab program does...and when I do buy a book anywhere but the campus bookstore, it's out of my pocket and takes a couple of months to get reimbursed. (I still do it occasionally though.)
Click to expand...

$600 for books? That's crazy.

I spent 10% of that for all my books this quarter (2 chemistry textbooks)
 
Originally posted by: Brainonska511
Originally posted by: BoomerD
So far, I've spent over $600 for books and working papers this semester. I already had one textbook (for part 2 of a class) and still need one book for a class I'm waitlisted for. (this semester, $168 was the most expensive textbook/package of crap I had to buy, plus 62 for the working papers)

Have you checked Craigslist for the books your daughter needs? I LIKE buying used textbooks from other students. It makes them a bit more money than they get from the school's buy-back program, (the rip-off pricks) and saves me a bit.

Fortunately, I don't have to pay for my books...my voc-rehab program does...and when I do buy a book anywhere but the campus bookstore, it's out of my pocket and takes a couple of months to get reimbursed. (I still do it occasionally though.)
Click to expand...

$600 for books? That's crazy.

I spent 10% of that for all my books this quarter (2 chemistry textbooks)
Click to expand...


I spend between $500 and $600 every semester except summer...when I only usually take 2 classes, so about $300 for summer.
 
screw the other sites, just get them off amazon.com or half.com

I prefer used books, they are much much cheaper...even better if you can get softcover!
 
Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
screw the other sites, just get them off amazon.com or half.com

I prefer used books, they are much much cheaper...even better if you can get softcover!
Click to expand...

If you are planning on using your books for reference throughout your career I would recommend spending a few extra $$ to get hard cover. The couple engineering texts I got in paperback in college are already starting to fall apart after 3-5 years.
 
Another note on international versions: Some other students in the engineering program have used them, and one thing that they usually notice is that all of the homework and sample problems are in metric, versus the US versions which are usually about 50/50. Sometimes they have simply converted, so one problem might talk about a 1 inch dimension, and the metric version uses 2.54 cm. More often though they favor round numbers, so the answers will differ.

In other words, you've got to use someone else's US-version book to get the proper homework problems.


And what Bignateyk said, yes, if you want to use your books for a long time, go for the hardbound versions. A lot of my professors have bookshelves in their offices with a lot of their own college textbooks still there. Some new things do get added with each new version, but a lot of the basic principles remain the same.



I have used Amazon for my textbooks. My campus bookstore is kind of irritating though, in that they don't list ISBN numbers on their website. You need to wait until a few days before the semester starts, go to the bookstore, get the numbers, and buy the textbooks for the first week or so of classes. Then once the books finally arrive in the mail, you then need to go take up more of the bookstore's employee's time returning the textbooks you no longer need. It seems to me that it could save them that time and hassle to just list the damn ISBN numbers on the website.

And if you do use Amazon, only use the cheap shipping option, which is almost always going to be Media Mail, if you have a lot of time to spare. Media Mail seems to use very slow 3-legged mules as the primary mode of transport.

 
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