Save Big Money on Your Textbooks This Semester With These 3 Simple Tricks

One of the most absurd things about higher education is the prices you have to pay for your textbooks. This isn’t by necessity; it’s an outright scam on college students led by a coalition of the colleges and the textbook publishers. They have joined in an effort to keep prices ridiculously high, and make up their own rules in an effort to force you to pay. The advent of the internet has helped students to find bargains on their books, but some of the tricks the schools and publishers have come up with attempt to negate this to some extent.

When a student looks to purchase their textbooks online, they have to compete with a maze of slightly altered ISBN numbers that have been designed to confuse students. The schools will often dictate that an identical book with a different ISBN number is not acceptable for a class. Many students fall for this, and fail to pursue other options, deciding instead to just pay whatever the bookstore wants. Often times, a school will have a unique edition of a textbook, specific to that school , to prevent the market for used books from affecting their bottom line. These specific editions are generally little more than a different sequence of the same chapters, are missing an excerpt from one chapter, or something else that would not affect your ability to get a good grade in any of your classes.

There are a few things you can do to save hundreds of dollars each semester on your textbooks. First, never buy your books before your class starts. Very rarely will you need your textbook on the first day of class, and this will give you an opportunity to ask the professor if the prior edition of the book is good enough for the class. In many cases, they will tell you that you will be fine with the last edition, since much of the material is identical. You can expect to pay about $20 or less for the prior edition of a book, since there is very little demand for these books.

Another trick is to buy international editions of your textbooks. Your college bookstore will strongly advise you against this, but it’s really only because they lose money if you buy these editions, as the content is generally identical. Don’t expect to be able to sell these books back to the bookstore, but with the money you save up front it won’t matter, plus you can always put it up for sale on Craigslist or eBay.

Finally, use a textbook search engine. There are a lot of websites that may offer the textbook you need, but it can take forever to search all these sites individually.