Textbooks, Textbooks, Textbooks…
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Photo by spcummingsI feel like I am a veteran at this now — I just completed the checkout process (at Half.com) for what I think will be my last textbook order for the semester. The total bill at all stores ended up being around $350 this semester — it certainly has been worse, but of course it is rarely fun to spend that much money.
How can textbooks be so expensive?
Venting on Textbooks
Every semester I am amazed at the business in the campus bookstore — these books are expensive, very expensive — and equally amazed at the number of people who buy from the bookstore simply out of blind convenience. I have no idea what the profit margin is on these books, but it seems like business must be booming for them.
How are campus bookstores able to thrive so much? The convenience argument is a strong one; it can take time to get books that are ordered online, which can be a problem when you are starting class soon. I can’t help but think, however, that a lot of it has to do with the fact that many college students have little incentive to try to minimize their textbook costs. For many of my college friends, their parents either directly, indirectly, or temporarily cover the cost of textbooks for them, and while this is certainly a generous offer, given that the parent is (hopefully) not in the check-out line at the bookstore, there is not much pressure to cut costs. Unfortunately, this just perpetuates the situation and does little to alleviate the problem for those students who have to cover their own costs.
The issue of textbook costs seems to pop up as a “hot issue” every year around this time, with the theme this year being that help seems to be on the horizon. Besides the option of buying used/discount textbooks online, the federal government and many states are trying to reduce the cost of textbooks through legislation, while at the same time some professors and textbook authors are providing their textbooks online. I am not very optimistic that these measures will have much of an effect, but something is certainly better than nothing.
Options Buying Online
So it should come as little surprise that, of all of the rituals that occur at the beginning of the school year, none is more frustrating to me than that of the textbook dilemma — the attempt to balance the potential rewards of hunting for textbooks online with the convenience of the local campus bookstore. There are certainly savings to be had online, but there is also something to be said for the time and effort often necessary to realize those savings.
Thankfully it has gotten easier to use the internet to try to maximize savings on college textbooks. It used to largely be a choice between Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com for textbooks; in the last few years used book sites like Half.com have exploded in popularity, and now there are countless stores out there on the internet. Lifehacker.com recently ran an article that listed the best ways to save money on textbooks — while some of their ideas like renting textbooks are interesting, hands down the suggestion to use a book search engine like BigWords.com seems most useful.
BigWords makes it easy to quickly search for the best prices online for both new and used versions of multiple books at once, and has several nice features including finding the best combination of stores for a given set of books, taking into account shipping costs and other promotions. It certainly is one of the better ways to try to save as much money as possible.
My Own Strategy
To begin with, I rather liberally take advantage of my campus bookstore’s return policy — textbooks can be returned at any point during the first two weeks of class; this allows me to purchase the textbooks for use during the first few days while I search for the textbooks online. At the end of the return period, I bring the books back to the campus bookstore for a full refund, by which time my online orders start to arrive. This, of course, requires taking care of the books while I have them temporarily.
As for the hunt online — I don’t mind getting used textbooks, but I generally like that the textbooks be like-new with minimal writing or highlighting; its a personal preference, but I find too much mark-up distracting in my books. As a result, I’m frustrated sometimes when I use websites that aggregate search results, which often gives results that make it difficult to tell what the quality is.
After a few semesters of trying various textbook search engines, I’ve ultimately ended up primarily relying on three sources: Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Half.com. Half.com is probably one of the largest used book dealers, and I’ve been generally happy with the prices I found there; as a result, I usually check Half.com first. If I don’t like what I see, I then usually check out Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. The nice thing about purchasing with Amazon or Barnes and Noble is that when you buy through them and not their merchant place, not only are the books new and shipped quickly, but you can also benefit from free shipping once you cross $25.
I like my admittedly simple system because it does not require a lot of work on my part but at the same time brings about some substantial savings compared to simply buying the textbooks at the campus bookstore. After all, with several hundred dollars at stake, every little bit helps.
End of Year: The Textbook Dilemma
One of the inevitable tasks at the end of a school year is what exactly to do with textbooks. As any one who has had the pleasure of attending college recently can attest, these books are not cheap — I cringe when I think about how much I spend each semester — which makes the problem of what to do with them all the more difficult. Over time, though, I have started to figure out a system that works for me.
Sending Books Home
The first step I always take is to identify which books I might want to keep for the future. I have never found much use in keeping old textbooks with me at school — all they do is take up valuable space — so I generally pack up and ship home any books that I want to keep.
Unfortunately, textbooks are often quite heavy, which is never a good thing when shipping. Thankfully, the US Postal Service provides a special shipping rate for boxes that contain books and media only, called Media Mail shipping. It is not the fastest shipping method, but gets the job done — to ship a five pound book across the country from New York to LA, for example, would cost a little under eleven dollars using the normal parcel post, but only three and a half dollars using Media Mail.
Selling the Rest
That is usually the easy part — the hard part is dealing with the books I no longer want. I quickly learned that selling back to the campus bookstore is a terrible deal. So instead, I have generally been selling them on the internet.
Despite my initial concerns, It is actually remarkably simple to sell used textbooks online. There are lots of websites out there in this field (just try searching Google for “sell used textbooks“), but I generally stick with Half.com, which is a part of Ebay. With Half.com, the process usually goes something like this after registering:
- Select “Sell your stuff” and enter the ISBN number for the textbook
- Fill out the quality information and description, set a price, and list it for sale.
- Wait to be notified that you have a sale
Once you make a sale, you need to mail the book fairly quickly; Half.com provides you a small payment to cover shipping costs on-top of your sale price. For each transaction, Half.com takes a small commission for itself, and then the rest of your earnings are held in your account, and soon thereafter are direct deposited into your bank account. It all is very straightforward, and I have had nothing but pleasant experiences as both a buyer and seller on Half.com
Just a quick note on pricing: one of the nice things about Half.com is you get to see the range of prices at which other sellers are offering your book. Not surprisingly, the cheapest copies are what people gravitate towards, and as a result I generally will be fairly aggressively in listing my textbooks at the lower end of the price range. It may not maximize my return, but it usually results in a quicker sale.
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