Monday, August 24, 2015

6 tips for saving on textbooks

The days of having to buy your textbooks on campus and campus only are long gone. May those days rest in peace and be a faint memory. However, during this day and age textbooks can cost you an arm, leg, and your grandma. Thankfully, you can save your grandma, arm, and your leg because there a ways to get those pricey books for much cheaper.

Source: Opensourceway / CC BY-SA

Here are my 6 tips to help you save on those textbooks:

Shop Online

If you haven’t figured out by now, you can buy your textbooks online. Yup, it is usually cheaper too. Barnes & Nobles, Amazon, Half.com, CengageBrain.com, AbeBooks.com, and many other sites actually sell a wide variety of textbooks. However, when trying to find the best price, you should put the ISBN in BigWords.com. BigWords.com searches multiple sites that also scour the internet for coupons and other great money saving deals.

E-books

Did you know getting e-books are a lot cheaper than paperback books? Yup, all you need is a tablet and you can have all your books on a light weight tool rather than carrying all of your books to class. Might as well kill two birds with a single money saving stone.

Rent your books

If you are anything like my sister, you should rent your textbooks because why is there a need to keep them? You can rent your books either from your campus bookstore or Chegg.com, eCampus.com, Bookbyte.com, and many other sites.

Buy an earlier edition

Yes, yes, yes! I highly recommend this. If you have earlier edition use it because they are basically the same. Your professor may and will frown upon it, but who needs the few sentences and updated photos anyway; when you can save a ton of money?

Get an international edition

Purchasing an international edition is pretty much similar to using an earlier edition. Hey, when money is an issue, you got to do, what you have to do.

Share with a friend

You were brought up on sharing is caring, right? Why not share your textbooks with your friend because it can cut the cost of buying textbooks in half easily. All you have to do is make a plan for who has the book when and for how long.


Here are the top 6 tips to save money when you are out there buying textbooks. Always shop around, don’t feel as if you need to head in that campus bookstore and buy your books at sticker price. 

4 comments :

  1. Great tips! My very first semester of college, I purchased brand new textbooks because I liked that they were new and to me, it was part of the college experience. Well when the semester ended and I tried to sell them, I wasn't able to because new versions had come out (of course). So since then, I always got the e-book versions of them because it was SO much cheaper and I didn't have to worry about selling them back. Now I'm an online student so it just makes everything easier as well haha

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    1. Ah, I did that my first semester too. I love paperbooks because I get distracted using e-books. :(

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  2. Great Tips! Will definitely be using these when I go to college next year :)

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    1. I am glad I can help. :) I will definitely try and put up some more money saving tips to help you out!

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