Secret #6 Textbooks: New, Used, or Rented?

The worst part of college is, hands down, shopping for books. Every semester students drop tons of cash on books they have no desire to read. Book buying, like any other type of shopping has a catch. When you are buying books you have three options to choose from, but you can only have two.

1. Cheap low price. 
2. Easy  work it takes to find the book and purchase it. 
3. Fast time it takes for you to actually get the book whether it’s in your hand or on your computer.

Fast & Easy

Buying a new book from your university bookstore is convenient, but that convince comes at a high price. If you want to save money, be prepared to spend a little extra time shopping for your books. The extra money in your pocket will make the effort well worth it.  

New books are always overpriced. If you are assigned a book that was written by your professor and are having trouble finding a used copy, consider posting a comment on your universities Facebook page or joining a book swapping group. My university has a “free and for sale page” where people can post items they want or items they have and want to get rid of. If your university doesn't have one of these, check out SWAP SHOP. This is an app where students sell books to one another; this process of cutting out the middleman lowers the cost for the buyer and increases profit for the seller.       

Cheap & Easy

Buying or renting a used book can save you hundreds of dollars. With comparison sites such as slugbooks, booksprice, and allbookstores, buying & renting books has never been easier.

If you are only going to use a book for a single semester, rent it. Buying a book is a lot of work, because when the class is over you have to find a way to sell it. If you're renting, you get it at a fraction of the cost, and you simply ship it back when you are done. I rent most of my textbooks through Amazon. They ship them quickly, and as always, the shipping is free. I recently rented a book that I later decided to keep. With Amazon I was able to purchase that same book that I already had, and they even removed the rent fee from my purchase total. There are many other websites that rent textbooks. Some that I have used in the past are chegg.com and eBay’s half.com

Cheap & Fast

        Get as many eBooks as you can, because eBooks are often cheaper than the printed copies, and you don’t have to carry them around! Most eBooks also have additional features that regular books don't have. Some features to look for are:

•       Audio capabilities it will read the book to you
•       Search function this makes homework and take-home quizzes a breeze
•       Solution guides Chegg offers a discount on the solutions if you buy/rent eBooks from them
•       Videos that enable you to better understand the topic
•       Page printing you can print a limited amount of pages from the book. This is really helpful for printing                     homework problems or charts that you might need to look at again.

        When you purchase an eBook from a company you have to sign up for an account and download the book. You’ll have the book instantly, but registering and keeping track of your passwords can be a hassle.

     Consider buying an older addition. Older additions are cheap, but often require a little extra work on your part. Text book companies frequently release new additions of their textbooks so that they can increase prices. Fortunately, these additions are often very similar to one another. The publisher may have fixed some minor errors or changed a problem or two, but more often than not, the books have the same content.  Ask your professor if they would be okay with you using an older addition; they may even tell you what the differences are. In most cases the chapters and the page numbers will be rearranged. You will need to find the correct page that corresponds with your reading assignment. Don’t worry; this doesn't take long if you use the table of contents or the index in the back of your text book.

        Only buy older additions if you know that the field of study hasn't changed. For example, it is probably safe to buy an old calculus book or even an ancient history book, because those subjects haven't really gone under any enormous changes within the past few years. Some subjects you want to avoid buying an older book for are physiology and sociology; new studies are constantly released that change the perspective in these fields causing older textbooks to quickly become obsolete. 



   With the fall semester quickly approaching, I hope that after reading this post you will be able to choose what book-buying option works best for you, and put it to the test. I have found that a certain combination of all three options works best for me, but it changes every semester.

     Happy Shopping!