The Ultimate College Saving Tips Site

Your bookstore will pay the whole-sale price for your textbooks. After all, a large class has 100-200 students. If you have 4 sections, that is 1000 students who need the same book.  That is 1000-books order for the publisher. A big order.

So despite the outrageous price your bookstore charges you, how much do you think the publisher charges your bookstore per book?

I think it’s between 40-60% off the retail price. That’s a sweet deal.

The bookstores marks up the price and sell the books to the students. After every semester, they buy back used books and resell them again for next year’s class.

Then the bookstore will do that again and again until a new edition is published. Then they will stop buying back used copies and restock their shelves with new-edition books.

Profit. Profit. Profit.

P.R.O.F.I.T

This makes you wonder:

Why spending 4 hard years in college to get a job that only pay 30,000$ per year?

Just open a bookstore and monopolizes on a college campus and you will be a millionaire next semester!

You know you will only get a few bucks when reselling your textbooks back to your bookstore.

That applies to most of your books but…

if you bought a book on Half.com for 2 $ and your bookstore is willing to pay 7$ for it, do you sell?

Of course. That’s a 5 $ profit.

Why not, right?

But which books will work in this case?

Reading books. You know, books for English courses, for example.

You can buy brand-new reading books on Half.com or Amazon for pennies on the dollars. Keep it clean. Then you resell them for dimes on the dollars.

It’s fast sell and you make a little money.

So what do you think?

Can it?

I mean it can work, right?

For classes that require general knowledge, a computer is all you really need.

All of old information has been duplicated all over the place on the net. Why pay 160$ of a textbook when you can get the same information for free.

Sure, this method does not work well when you take classes specific to your major. But it can work for a few classes.

A few classes can add up to hundreds of dollars in saving. Who wouldn’t want that?

Take a look at your college textbooks.

So many charts and pictures.

So many beautiful colors.

So many unnecessary things.

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of courses depending on those charts and pictures. But others don’t.

Should they make black-and-white copies available?

They should.

If you need the full-color one, you will buy that.

But if you are short of 20$ to buy the full-color ones, you can settle for the black-and-white versions.

Printing books in black-and-white is cheaper. In several courses, you don’t need any picture. Just black-and-white text is just fine.

Have you ever take a look at the study guide of your main textbook?

No?

Well, you may be missing out on a big saving.

Study guide is like a summary of your main textbook. It just tells you important content. Sometimes it has quizzes or tests to test your knowledge.

It’s very helpful. So helpful that it can replace the main book.

For general Economics class, study guide is easier to understand than the main book. It just tells you what you need to know.

If you are taking this kind of classes to satisfy a requirement, then check out the study for your books first to see if you rather buy the study guide instead of the main textbook.

Buying the main textbook online is cheap. But if you only want to buy the study guide on popular online bookstores like Half.com or Amazon, it will be much cheaper.

If you need cheap History or English textbooks but can’t find cheap deals anywhere else, try Overstock.com.

Heard of Overstock before?

Basically, it’s just an online store that buy excesses from manufacturers and then resell them at a lower price.

It has large selection of reading books for you to choose, especially English book.

Overstock often have promotions on shipping.

Right now, they have 2.95$ flat rate shipping on your entire order.

But 2 things you need to know:

• Only for shipping within US 48 states, not including Alaska and Hawaii
• If you buy only books, you might not get 2.95$ shipping

So if you can’t find your books anywhere else, see if Overstock has it.

If you like to compare the price of your textbooks across 20 or so online bookstores, you want a reliable price comparison site.

Here are 18 options for you to choose. Keep in mind, they are  in no particular order. Choose the one that you feel most comfortable and easy to navigate.

1. Bigwords

2. Directtextbooks

3. BookFinder

4. Wecomparebooks

5. Textbooks411

6. Addall

7. Allbookstores

8. Campusbooks4less

9. CollegeSwapshop

10. Bestwebbuys

11. Abebooks

12. Bestbookdeal

13. BookFinder4U

14. Booksprice

15. Campusbooks

16. DealOZ

17. Cheaptextbooks

18. Ecampus

All of these above are search engine to compare textbooks price across 10 or 20 major online bookstores.

They will generally give you the same information since they get the data from similar sites like Half, Amazon, Texbooks.com, and Biblio, etc…

There are some really ridiculous price as you go down the listings. But just pay attention to the first half of the search.

The list above is for your reference. You may be familar with 1 or 2 of them but have never heard of the rest. If you want to hunt for the cheapest deal, you can try all of them.

Go to the bookstore, take a look at your textbooks. How many of your books are bundled with all of the extra things like study guide, solution guide, interactive CD, online access code, etc…

Notice again if you see the sticker that says “No return if shrink wrap torn off” or something like that.

So what does this mean?

2 things.

• You HAVE to buy all of these extra things although you don’t need them. You just HAVE to. You have no choice.
• Once you buy it, you can’t return the package. Even if you do, they will buy it at 10% of the original price. They will repackage the books and sell them as new to the next student.

You need the main textbook for the course. But how the heck can you read the main text without tearing off the shrink wrap? X-ray vision now, huh?

But once you tear off the shrink wrap, you can’t return the bundled textbook even if you drop the class.

Either way you lose.

So should you allow to choose whether or not you buy the extra stuffs?

You should.

Scratch that.

You must.

You must be allowed to control how you spend your money on textbooks.

Why? because you are a college student.

You are broke.

You have a tight budget.

You earn minimum wage.

You eat instant noodle every other day.

You are always afraid your bank account go to negative at the end of the month.

So who should decide what supplemental materials you should buy? It’s YOU.

Publishers says those extra materials are helpful.  So what? Just make them available if you need it. You will decide if they are helpful or not.  Don’t bundle them altogether with the main text and force you to buy them all.

If you have used textbooks and would like to donate, would you like to give them to prisoners?

Yes?

Please donate your used textbooks through Books Through Bars organization.

What Is Books Through Bars?

• Founded in late 1980s
• Provide free books to prisoners (for reading and preparing for GED exams so they can rebuild their lives)
• Provide more than 8000 book-packages to prisoners
• Have more than 300 volunteers

How Can You Donate Your Used Textbooks?

• You can search for a Books Through Bars program near you. There are many location in US East Coast. So if you live in NY, PA, NJ,CT, etc..there will be a location in your state.
• To find a location near you, click here to search
• If you want to donate a small amount of money to help them offset the increase in postage cost, you can too. Here’s the link.

Would You Like To Contact Books Through Bars?

Books Through Bars
4722 Baltimore Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19143
Phone: (215) 727-8170
E-mail: info@booksthroughbars.org

Can’t find the information you need here, visit Books Through Bars official site.

Donate your books if you can. Don’t let them end up in the trash. There are many more places you can donate your books. Stay tuned.

You are tired of buying new textbooks at the bookstore. This semester, you will buy used textbooks online.

Just one problem.

No clue which book you will need exactly.

There are tons of Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, and Economics. Which is the right one?

Run to your bookstore 2 weeks before your class start. Most professors have already assigned textbooks for the courses.

Make sure you know which book is Recommended and which is Required. You will need the Required ones anyway.

Get the ISBN number and start searching online.

2 weeks is generally enough time for the book to arrive.  You will get your textbooks on time and won’t fall behind in class.

Plus you will save more money than the guy sit next to you with his shiny new textbook. Sure, it’s shiny now but its value will drop so fast that when it’s time for the bookstore to buy back that book, he doesn’t even have time to say: But..but…it’s like new…!!?