How I Beat the Bookstore: Part 1
I am a big proponent of not buying textbooks from the campus bookstore. Textbooks are already expensive, but bookstores also try to get their hooks in us also, forcing us to buy books at inflated prices and then offering us pennies on the dollar to sell the books back - giving them pure profit. I am starting a little miniseries on how I’ve beaten the bookstore, saving money on both ends of the semester, buying them at a discount and then selling them for a better price than the bookstore. I’ll also show you how you can do it too.
Buying This Semester’s Books
Before the semester started, I did some preliminary checking, to see how the prices at the bookstore were going to compare to prices online, an important thing to do because from time to time, especially with new editions of textbooks, not many people have the book for sale, and if they do, it may be at a minimal discount when comparing to the bookstore. At that point, I will just buy the book at the store. However, most of the time your best bet will be to buy the book online. I use Half.com (an ebay site), but most of what I talk about can be applied to other websites where you can buy and sell textbooks, like Amazon.
If all you do is buy your books online, and not selling them back online, you will still do pretty well. You can see in the table below, my bill based on new and used prices at the bookstore (note that you usually have to get lucky to get used books for a lot of classes) versus what I paid online for the books. All of the books I bought online were new or barely used - they looked almost new, and they weren’t the cheapy “International Editions”. That gave me a 34% savings over buying the books in the store.
| Bookstore | Bookstore | Half.com | |
| New | Used | (Actual) | |
| Circuits Text | 126.65 | 94.99 | 105.98 |
| Govt #1 | 35.67 | 26.74 | 34.30 |
| Govt #2 | 28.15 | 21.11 | 13.99 |
| Systems Text |
133.15 | 99.86 | 67.99 |
| Algorithms | 141.43 | 106.09 | 83.94 |
| TOTAL | 465.04 | 348.78 | 306.20 |
| Savings | 25% | 34% |
Note: The half.com prices include the shipping that I paid, and bookstore prices include tax.
The only compelling reason I can think of why not to buy your textbooks online is if you need the book immediately, because depending on where you buy the book from and what shipping option you pick, it can take between 2 days and 2 weeks. The easiest way to avoid that though is to pick shippers close to you and select expedited shipping (for an extra 2-3 dollars).
I like the idea that (depending on who I buy from) my money is going back to other college students, and staying out of the hands of the big bookstores working to make money to support their huge operations.
Stay tuned for my next post in the series, where I talk about how I beat the bookstore when I sell my textbooks.
May 3rd, 2008 at 9:01 am
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