Where To Get Cheap Textbooks For College
The price tags on college textbooks are rising just as fast as tuition costs.
For a single course, a student may spend over $200 on required reading materials, yet only use the book for one semester.
But because many courses do not require students to have a new copy of the text, students preference for cost-efficient alternatives has given rise to the growing market for used college textbooks.
This increased demand has motivated many book suppliers to offer used textbook and rental services, leaving college students with an array of options
Free Shipping And Coupons
We know that college is expensive and we know you need to be able to save as much money as you can when youre buying your college textbooks. Thats why we work really hard to help you save as much as you can. We are constantly on the lookout for FREE shipping offers and coupons. Our staff scours the internet in order to find the best FREE shipping offers and coupons. We look at blogs, forums and contact stores on a continual basis to help make sure you can get your college textbook at the cheapest price possible. If there is a free shipping offer or coupon out there, rest assured we will find it.
Options For Buying College Textbooks From Chegg
Students needs vary from student to student which is why we offer new textbooks, used textbooks, etextbooks, and textbook rental. You can access your college textbooks the way you want to when you buy or rent through Chegg. When you find your textbook title, click on its listing to compare the options and prices.
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Additional Suggestions From Members Of Our Paying For College 101 Facebook Group:
For purchasing college textbooks, check out Abe Books.
To compare prices for buying and renting, check outBook.ly.
Check the Gates Foundation Open Staxfor access to free openly sourced college textbooks.
One parent in the group cautions,
Double check with the professor that the textbook is actually needed.
My daughter had a class or two where the professor used online text, PowerPoint presentations, and handouts just because the book is listed for the class does not 100% mean they need it.
Campusbooks For Iphone & Droid Smartphones
Put the Power of CampusBooks.com on Your Smartphone and Find the Best Deals on Textbooks Wherever You Are!
With the free CampusBooks for iPhone and Android apps, everything you love about CampusBooks.com’s powerful money-saving search engine and price-comparison tool is now with you on the go! Wherever you are, you’re just a few touches away from finding the best deals when buying and selling textbooks.
Now GPS integrated to show you nearby libraries and bookstores stocking your books!
CampusBooks for iPhone and Android App Capabilities:
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Read Your Textbooks Online With Perlego
Perlego is a digital online library that offers access to over 500,000 textbooks. Youll pay a monthly or annual subscription to access all of Perlegos content, and you can even download most titles to access offline!
You dont need to commit straight away either you can search Perlegos library for your textbooks before becoming a member, and can also make use of a 14-day trial. If you do decide Perlego is for you, great news: its super affordable, with a yearly subscription running around $100. Thats less than the price of one college textbook!
Fun Facts About Textbookscom:
- Textbooks.com has over 10 million new and used books in its warehouse for you to choose from.
- It has great buy-back deals, and it will even cover the cost of the shipping label for you to ship your books!
- The Textbooks.com is a community of over 10,000 independent sellers, all of whom are vetted and authorized to sell.
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How To Find Cheap Used & New Textbooks
Buy Books From Your Fellow College Students
This method can take a little forward planning, but it can be a good way to find heavily discounted books without ever having to shop online. During the semester before your class is due to start, seek out students who are currently enrolled in the class and see if they will be willing to sell their books to you when the time comes.
Many of these students will have purchased their textbooks outright and will probably be quite happy to sell them on when theyre done with them. It saves both you and the other student time and money, plus, you can both feel good about yourselves for recycling.
To find the students who are in the class youre going to take next semester, you can:
- Approach the professor
Tell them your plan to buy textbooks from fellow students and see if they can introduce you to anyone. They might even announce the end of class and point potential book vendors in your direction.
- Check Facebook
Post in your student community groups or year groups on Facebook to see if anyone has the textbook you need. Some college campuses even have their textbook exchange groups. If you see one of those, join it right away they can save you a ton of money.
- Check Craigslist
You can buy and sell pretty much anything in your local area on Craigslist, and textbooks are no exception. There could be students in your area listing exactly the book you need.
- Check the campus notice boards
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Buy Or Rent An Older Edition
Textbooks regularly get updated. Thats the nature of knowledge the more humans learn, the more we need to cram it into our books. So its no surprise that every so often, a textbook is updated, edited, or added to, and a new edition is released.
In an ideal world, wed all have enough money to buy the brand new edition of a textbook so that we can be sure the information in there is appropriate to the class were taking. But unfortunately, the new edition of any textbook is likely to be the most expensive.
Realistically, many new editions dont vary much from the previous one, especially when it comes to subjects that always remain the same, for example, Ancient History. Unless there have been some groundbreaking new discoveries recently that are going to be covered in this semesters syllabus, then the key information will all be the same.
Thats why you can get away with using an older edition of a textbook with no issues whatsoever in a lot of cases.
If youre still unsure if you can get by on an older edition, then contact your professor in plenty of time before the first day of class and ask them what they think. They will likely be sympathetic to how expensive textbooks can be, and if they believe that you can get by using an older edition, theyll let you know.
Suppose youre still struggling to find a better deal with an older edition of a textbook. In that case, you can also check out international editions. These can often be a fraction of the price.
How To Get College Textbooks For Free
Higher education is getting more and more expensive, and the cost of college textbooks is no small part of that equation. But the concept of free college textbooks is not just a classroom daydream.
In this article, were going to go over several ways to get free or nearly free college textbooks.
Well also show you some sites that rent course books and even where you can sell them once the semesters over.
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Share Books With Your Fellow Students
Whats better than buying books? Sharing books, of course! Why not ask your fellow classmates whether they would consider sharing a textbook so you dont have to buy one each? Suppose its not a super labor-intensive class and youre happy to only have access to the book during certain times. In that case, splitting the cost between a few of you is the perfect solution.
Using this method can also be a great way of making friends with your classmates at the start of a brand new semester!
Books For Less: The 10 Best Sites To Buy College Textbooks
2019/08/28 at 9:00 AM2y ago13
A new school year is starting which means youve got to start thinking about paying tuition if your financial aid didnt cover it all. This is stressful enough without having to add the price of textbooks on top of it. Still, you need textbooks to get through classes so its not like you can skip out on them.
What if we told you that you dont have to settle for the pricy books in your college store. You can find the best sites to buy college textbooks and get amazing deals. To help you start your year off with more money in your pocket, here are a few of these great sites.
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What Is A Good And Cheap Website To Buy College Textbooks From
Other than Amazon and Half.com…? I am also terribly sorry if this is the wrong sub to ask. And thank you!
Chegg.com is a great site to rent from. Super cheap.
Plus sometimes they send you cool stuff! I got a month of hulu, a shutterfly gift card, and a red bull last time i rented from Chegg!
It compares from different options and shows you the best.
You just have to input your college and course. It seems they are not offering this anymore. Now you have to input the title or ISBN.
Seconding this, also craigslist of the college’s area
There’s a great plugin/extension for your browser that shows you cheapest alternatives for books when you browse your school’s bookstore. I can’t remember its name – try a Google search.
Input the ISBN into bigwords.com and it compares a bunch of different sites so you can find the lowest price
Definitely use cheapesttextbooks.com It is the best because, you search a textbook and it lists every site that has that textbook in order of price. And it gives you for rent, used, new, every option. It even tells you what those textbooks would cost after shipping.
USE Cheapesttextbooks.com!
How To Sell Used College Textbooks
At the end of a term, you may be staring at your pile of textbooks wondering what to do with them. Books are bulky, are difficult to transport, and may not have much future value depending on what they cover. As a result, selling used college textbooks is a popular decision for many students.
There are several options you can explore if you’re interested in selling your old textbooks. If you find buyers for your books, you can significantly lower the overall annual cost of your textbooks.
At the end of each term, many campus bookstores host buyback events where they pay you for any textbooks that will be used again the next term. This is a convenient option that usually puts money in your pocket immediately.
While this may be the quickest and most convenient option, selling books to the campus bookstore doesn’t tend to yield the most money. Bookstores know that many students are simply looking to get rid of their books, so the prices they offer aren’t usually the most competitive.
If you’re not impressed with the offer made by your campus bookstore, you could try selling your textbooks online independently. Websites like Amazon and eBay allow you to sell your books to other customers. You may also find a buyer for texts that your campus bookstore didn’t want to buy back.
This process could earn you more money than selling through a third party, but selling your textbooks online can be inconvenient, especially if you need to ship your books and aren’t near a post office.
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How To Find Cheap College Textbooks: The Ultimate Guide
While college is one of the highlights of most peoples lives, the thought of having toshell out so much money on tuition, the cost of living, and more can be overwhelming. One cost that can be particularly difficult to stomach is how much youll spend on college textbooks.
The College Boardestimates that students spend over $1,200 each year on textbooks and course materials ouch! Thankfully, there are plenty of resources to help you find cheap college textbooks and avoid breaking the bank.
Is Textbook Rental Right For You
YES if…
- You like your savings all at once up front .
- You don’t want to keep the book when the term is finished.
- You take good care of your books and are cool with moderate or little highlighting.
- You care about minimizing your impact on the environment.
NO if…
- You tend to make a lot of marks in your books or you damage or lose them.
- You need all supplements such as CD-ROMs, workbooks, and access codes.
- You want to keep your books for future reference.
- You rely on getting some cash back at end-of-term buyback.
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Use Social Media To Find Cheap College Textbooks
Social media sites, such as Facebook, offer various means of procuring textbooks.
In addition to Facebooks expanding Marketplace feature where users can buy and sell items in their communities, students can enter their student email address into their colleges Facebook network and gain access to various school-specific buy and sell groups for textbooks.
You may find the best prices at the end of the semester, when students want to sell their textbooks before they pack up and leave for break.
The prices vary from seller to seller, but are likely lower in price than used textbooks from bookstores.
The only caveat is that you make sure the edition the student may be selling is the one you will need.
Find The Content You Need On Cengage
Cengage is a massive platform thats used by students and instructors around the world, with thousands of textbooks to choose from. As one of the first subscription-based content sites for books, its been labeled as a Netflix-style subscription service for students.
If you decide to sign up for a subscription to Cengage Unlimited you can access thousands of digital textbooks and course materials in any subject. While the service is about double the cost of Perlago, you can still save a stack of cash if your textbooks are accessible on this platform.
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Fun Facts About Bookfinder:
- Not only does it help find low costs to buy and rent books, but it also finds cost comparisons for buyback prices.
- The BookFinder website is part of the BookFinder.com/JustBooks network, which was produced by a team of high-tech librarians and programmers based in Berkeley, California, and Düsseldorf, Germany.
- BookFinder was launched in 1997 by then-19-year-old UC Berkeley undergraduate Anirvan Chatterjee.
- BookFinder is a one-stop ecommerce search engine that searches over 150 million books for salenew, used, rare, and out-of-print.
Where To Rent And Buy Books
You can typically find the best deal at third-party booksellers that allow you to rent what you need. You have the ability to rent textbooks for an entire semester, enjoying the ability to lightly highlight them and take notes (without going overboard, of course. Youll just have to make sure that you remember to send them back on time and in good condition, or else you could end up paying for the whole thing.
Here are a few examples of where you can rent textbooks or buy them at a reduced price!
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Get The Right Information: Author Title Isbn Number
You will need to know the title of the book, as well as the authors first and last name, and the edition of the book. If you get the ISBN number, you will be able to check and make sure you are getting the best deal on the book. With used books, prices can vary greatly for used books depending on the condition of the book.
It’s important to also always check the edition number. Many books have multiple editions, so while you might think you’re getting an awesome deal on the Fifth Edition, the class is actually using the Sixth Edition. This could also pose problems for homework assignments, lessons, and more.
Youll find the best prices online, but theres a lot of variation in price, especially for used books. Shop around to make sure youre getting the best deal, and double check the ISBN number to make sure youre looking at the exact same book.
While you may already be familiar with sites such as Amazon, Half.com, and CampusBooks.com, consider the options below for the best deal possible on your next set of college textbooks. Textbook comparison websites, such as Book Rocket can get you a quick price comparison from multiple websites for the best price with shipping and other discounts.