Exploring Your Options When Buying Textbooks

For the most part, college textbooks are not cheap. Depending on how many classes you are taking, what classes they are and the type of books, you can spend upwards of seven hundred dollars. And what college student has the money to spend that much on books?

This year, I'm beginning my first years of law school. The list price from the school for all the books I will need is $749.79. That's a bit higher then I can really afford at this time. Especially since the text books are not the only things I need to get to begin school come this fall. That being said, I took the full book list and set out on searching the Internet. Yes, you do want the full book list because there are usually more than one edition of a book out there and you want to make sure you've got the correct one.

My first step was to open multiple browsing tabs (or windows depending on what browser you're using) so that I could compare the different prices easily. Trust me, it's a lot easier to compare through multiple tabs then going to each page separately and researching the book. Copy and paste is also your friend at this point so you only have to type an ISBN once instead of multiple times.

Great, so the easy part is over. Now, there are literally hundreds of different web sites that say you can buy your college textbooks from them. I've only used two before though I have sold back to two others and so I checked them as well. The websites that I checked prices on were the school bookstore (sometimes you just may get lucky and they're the cheapest), AbeBoks.com, half.com, textbooks.com, ecampus.com and bn.com.

AbeBooks.com was a new one for me this year. We can thank AOL for that since they listed it as a cheap place to buy college textbooks from. Type in AbeBooks.com into your address bar and their homepage will load up with an easy to use ISBN search feature. Once you click search, a page will show all the available listings they have for that book, the price of the book and the condition for that particular edition. Easy as can be and for the most part, their prices are reasonable.

Half.com is a web site that I've used in the past to pick up various books that I've needed. When you get to the website, just click the 'textbook' link at the top. A part of ebay.com, you can see seller ratings and feedback to let you know if you want to purchase a book from a particular seller. They also list books in an easy to use format from "New" all the way down to "Acceptable" along with the prices for each. As with AbeBooks.com, this website is user friendly.

Textbook.com and ECampus.com are both websites that I've sold books back to but I've never purchased from. And after today, I know why. In comparing the various websites, these two sites were the highest priced; even more then the school store. In addition, textbook.com was sold out of most of the required books needed for the school. Of course, keep these two places in mind if you ever want to sell your textbooks as you can sometimes make the most money through them.

BN.com or Barnes and Noble is the last place that I check. If you are a member, you can save an additional 10% on top of whatever discounts they're offering; plus some of their used books are relatively cheap and you can use your 10% discount on those too.

Let's take a comparison of the different prices I've gotten from these websites on one of my books.

Torts and Compensation: 5^th Edition

School - $88.95
AbeBooks.com - $11.68
Half.com - $25.62
Textbook.com - Sold Out
ECampus.com - $174.19
BN.com - $116.80

Of course, there are tons of other web sites out there that sell textbooks. If these websites don't have what you're looking for/you don't like them, just open your favorite search program and look for buying college textbooks.