This post is from my (much) younger sister, Elyse. She’s starting college at Tulane University in the fall and is buying textbooks. To see how shopping for college textbooks has changed in the last 15 years thanks to the Internet and other technology, look for my comments in orange about what buying books was like when I went to college in the mid-90’s!
Buying college textbooks can be quite daunting. Next semester I will be taking six classes at Tulane. Four of those have listed books so far. When I went to college, professors didn’t have web sites to list textbooks on, so we didn't know what the books would be until we showed up for the semester. So there wasn’t much time to shop for alternative sources. Even without my last two classes, the books total $707.80 new. Wow, prices have gone up a lot! I do remember that some new books were over $100, but on average I spent much less than $177 per class.
I cannot, or at least choose not, to afford that absurd amount on my part-time-summer-only swim coach/life guarding salary (this is also my only spending money for the year). I considered getting a Kindle or iPad and buying e-books, but they didn’t look much cheaper than paperback editions of textbooks. This certainly wasn’t an option in 1995! Carrying around just one e-reader, instead of multiple heavy books, would be nice. And, with an e-reader, I couldn’t remember where things are like I can in a book. Plus it’s about 10% slower to read on an e-reader than a paper book.
So my next idea was to look on Half.com and Amazon. This is a major change: my only options were the school and commercial bookstores around campus, and the occasional in-person book exchange organized by a student group. In 1995, people wanted to be able to sell books directly to one another, cutting out the oligarchic bookstores as middlemen, but there wasn’t a good tool to match buyers and sellers. The Internet has made it much easier to comparison shop, letting students escape the overpriced-book bubble of campuses.
Textbook: $76 new; $2.79 used
I got lucky and found my Cultural Anthropology book for $2.79 for a savings of about $73. This is the equivalent of approximately 10 hours of work for me. However dubious I was about the quality or legitimacy of the book, I decided to buy it. That was on a Thursday.
The following Monday, I got a small paper envelope in the mail. Inside was the book in almost perfect condition. When I bought used textbooks in person, I got a chance to look through them first, so the risk of a damaged book was lessened. That is one perk of buying used books in person, but getting them cheaper online outweighs that. For anyone else needing to buy textbooks I would definitely recommend taking a few minutes to look for used items online. It will be well worth your time!
Update: The day after we published this post, the New York Times published a debate forum titled "The Real Cost of College Textbooks." Just like the Times to ride White Glove Apps' coattails! ;-) Well, check it out for additional perspectives on books, e-books, and prices.
The flipside of being able to buy your textbooks used online is that you can also resell them after the semester's over very easily. When I was in school (1996-2001), we were pretty much stuck selling them back to the campus bookstore for 10-20% of the original price and often the bookstore wouldn't even offer to buy most of them at any price. You could try to sell them directly to other students but without even craigslist being popular at the time, that required time consuming work posting ads on bulletin boards around campus. Now, my girlfriend is in a Nursing program and has been able to sell all her used textbooks on Amazon usually within days of the semester ending for a much better rate.
@Anders: Great point. I remember the book stores on and around campus got a huge margin on used books: they'd buy back your $100 book for $15, then turn around and sell it to the next semester's students for $80. Now, Amazon and other sites let individuals remove that market inefficiency by providing a marketplace to match sellers and buyers.
Good luck to your girlfriend in her studies! Nurses should be in high demand, especially in the US...
There's also a growing trend of Universities not providing ISBNs for book and forcing students to purchase directly through the university bookstore.
http://blog.textbookrevolt.com/2010/04/08/colleges-start-hiding-isbn-from-students-for-profit/
Another great option is to rent textbooks. You can usually save about 40% (including selling back - which is a joke anyways) which adds up. Lots of rental options including Book Renter, Chegg and our own Textbook Revolt (http://www.textbookrevolt.com).
Hopefully the days of overpriced textbooks with few options to save money are in the past.
@Jaisen: Wow, that's awfully harsh of universities to try to force students to purchase books through the university bookstore. Aren't the students already paying enough for tuition?!
Good luck with Textbook Revolt. Renting out books sounds like a great idea for most classes! I do still occasionally refer to textbooks from my major, so buying those might be worthwhile.
I also looked at renting books but it was often as expensive, if not more, than buying used books.
But be very careful when selling books online. I just had a problem on half.com where a buyer claims the box was empty. Problem was he sent a picture showing the sealed box that I sent and he couldn't get a hold of the mail carrier to get a statement that the box was deliveried damaged and/or empty. Raising any red flags for you yet?? This has been going on for 7 weeks, him demanding a refund but refusing to supply me any proof that the book was never recieved by him. Oh I did look on his web site and, you guessed it, there was the book for sale.
Now I'm going to have to refund the money to him per half.com because that is what they decided was fair. But he has to send the box back to me.
What a joke. I will be filing a claim of mail fraud with the USPS over this and his company.
So just be careful when you sell books over the internet. Make the people buy insurance, he refused to buy the insurance, that should have caught my attention, but it didn't as I have sold many books online without ever having a problem.
So wait, you expect me to not only buy my textbooks new, but not be able to sell them back at the end of the semester? Not exactly cost effective. If you’re looking for cheap college books, you have to check out http://www.cheapesttextbooks.com/. I used to buy used from one of the stores at UDEL until I found this site, they had every textbook I needed for this semester for like half the price. Then, you can sell them back to the stores for the same price. Can’t beat it.