Let's
face it, college textbooks are expensive and in order to save we have to be
smart about our purchases. You wouldn't go shopping for a brand new car
at one dealership and buy without shopping around so don't do the same
thing for textbooks. All too often I see young freshmen at the college
bookstore waiting in line to buy overpriced textbooks. When I first
started to shop around I was blown away at just how expensive the
college bookstore was. I started by checking out other bookstores not
affiliated with the college and even those places were a decent
savings. But I didn't get into the big savings until I started looking
online.
I remember my first online purchase, it was on amazon.com.
I saved so much money I knew right then and there I'd never purchase a
textbook in a store again. But what I didn't know was that amazon.com
isn't always the cheapest. For a few semesters I continued purchasing
textbooks through amazon until one day a friend told me that it was
cheaper at bookbyte.com.
I was a bit baffled by this because I had never even heard of bookbyte
and I couldn't imagine getting my textbooks even cheaper than amazon.
What I did remember is that golden rule: shop around before purchasing.
I started to wonder if I could find a textbook price comparison
tool to do the work for me, and I did, Retextbook. Retextbook is free
to use and will compare the cost of your textbook to buy new, buy used,
or even rent from over 20 different merchants. As I was nearing my last
semester until graduation I realized that I hadn't learned all there
was to saving money with textbooks.
Until
recently, I was also selling my textbooks to the same places I
purchased them. Yet again I was mistaken, even in selling textbooks I
should have shopped around to see who would give me the most money for
my used textbooks. Fortunately enough, if you want to sell textbooks online,
Retextbook also offers a comparison tool through their site. But even
with all these great tools at our disposal, we must think of how we use
them.
There
are other important things to keep in mind when it comes to textbooks
that will help you. If you're taking a class and it's not pertinent to
your major, for example a general education class, consider renting the
textbook. If you can't envision keeping the textbook for many years
then it might be wiser to rent your textbook, renting is often (but not
always) cheaper. If the class is directly related to your major, I
recommend purchasing the book, used if possible.
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About the Author
Kevin is a college student at Cincinnati State.