Save Money On Books For College

You might think that you have covered your child’s financial needs for college when you pay their tuition and room and board. But don’t overlook the cost of books for college, because it is not an insignificant number.
There are several alternatives to purchasing new textbooks from the college bookstore, including three that I’m going to talk about in this article:
Buy used textbooks.
Rent textbooks.
Use free online textbooks.
Buy Used Textbooks
One way that you can save money is to buy used textbooks, rather than new ones. The college bookstore usually offers this option, unless the professor has chosen a brand new edition of the textbook. Online textbook stores, like Barnes and Noble and Borders, also allow merchants to sell used copies of textbooks.
The risk in buying used textbooks is figuring out whether the status of the book is still acceptable. It’s really hard to read a textbook that has 80% of the text highlighted in yellow. The online booksellers provide a general description of the book’s status. University bookstores usually give out the best versions of the used books to the earliest orders, so if you are going that route you should order as early as possible.
Rent Textbooks
Renting books is a great new green option that can save significant dollars. You just ship them back at the end of the semester. One disadvantage is that you do not have the option to keep the book. And any suggested study guides are often not available. Chegg.com is one web site that can be used to rent books.
You might want to consider a combination of buying and renting – buying books related to the student’s major and renting the general education texts.
Free Online Textbooks
Several web sites now offer free online textbooks. You can start your search for these books by checking the book publisher’s web site.
College Bookstore Versus Online Textbook Store
Most bookstores tied to a university allow you to simply give them your list of classes and they put all the required books in a bundle to be picked up at the store. They are guaranteed to carry the right editions of all the books you need. They will usually buy the books back, at a fraction of the price you paid, at the end of the term.
Ordering from an online textbook store can save you money over the university bookstore. If you go this route, you probably want to do some comparison over several sites. Be sure to include shipping in your cost and delivery time comparison. Some of the individual merchants who sell used books are pretty slow about shipping. You can sell some textbooks back to online sellers, but I have not found this to be worthwhile for the money offered and the necessary shipping costs. Sometimes you can sell books purchased online to the university bookstore.
The ISBN Number
In order to search for textbooks, the key item that you need is the ISBN number for each book. The ISBN is unique for each edition of each book. Only by searching on the ISBN can you be sure that you are getting the edition that the professor wants the class to use. Your child’s university should provide a book list that includes the ISBN. My son’s bookstore web site provided a tool that let me put in the class codes and get a list of the required textbooks, including the ISBN.
Sometimes the publisher creates an ISBN for a specific bundle to be offered only by the university bookstore. For example, the bookstore listed one ISBN for my son’s economics book and the related study guide. Based on the edition number, I was able to figure out the separate ISBN numbers for the book and the study guide so that I could search for these items on other sites.
My son just started his first year at a state university in California. For his first semester, the university bookstore quoted new books at $595 and used books at $453. By using a combination of the purchase of used books through online textbook stores and renting textbooks, I paid $253.

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