Five Cent Dime

Everyone who has gone to college (and participated in one or more of their classes) knows that Textbooks can be complete ripoffs. At a state University in my hometown the tuition and fees for a full-time student are $2,264 per semester. At the local Community College the semester’s tuition is maxed out at $800 for 16 semester hours (or $600 for 12 hours of classes).

Without financial aid (from a private scholarship or the government) the money to cover these costs may be hard to come by, but we all realize that a college education is often a very valuable resource in this competitive world. The costs of the tuition and fees may mostly be warranted to provide the facilities and professors to teach our children and ourselves; but the cost of the books, outrageous!

Too often it is the case that professors require the absolutely newest edition of whatever textbook they planned on using in their class. The publishers will often use the exact same content but merely flip around the chapters and change where the text is placed on the pages.  There is usually no substantive reason for creating a “new edition” every year except to rip off students who are forced to purchase the book for fear of not being able to follow along in class.

Not to start a conspiracy here, but many times the professor will be given a free copy (by the publisher/salesman) of the latest edition if he requires his students to purchase that edition. The school bookstore (often a major chain bookstore masquerading as a part of the University) has quite a captive audience as students are sometimes not provided with the information on the required book(s) until the first day of class. The students typically have an assignment due within 1 or 2 class periods, and therefore they do not feel they have the time to wait for books to be ordered online and shipped to their house or dorm.

Looking back at the costs of tuition & fees in the example above: $2,264 for 12 hours at local University, $600 for 12 hours at local Community College.

The costs of college textbooks for a full 12 hours of classes per semester can typically be from $400-$750 depending on the textbooks selected. There is no excuse for being required to pay more for your books than your classes! If you happen to get a stubborn professor who absolutely requires a new textbook and you plan on giving in to his demands, there are a few alternative places you might look. The websites or locations are listed below with prices for purchasing or renting a textbook:

Book: Quantitative Chemical Analysis

School Bookstore – New: $174.95; Used: $131.20

http://www.half.com – New: $97.99-$118; Used: $88.98-$99.50

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

http://www.chegg.com Rent for Semester: $64.99; Rent for 60 Days: $54.84

http://www.bookrenter.com/ Rent for Semester: $75.22; Rent for 60 Days: $57.95

http://www.campusbookrentals.com/ Rent for Semester: $79.40; Rent for 60 Days: $66.29

The first website, http://www.half.com typically has some of the best used textbook prices around, but you can often find steals on new textbooks as well. It is owned by eBay and it operates in a similar fashion with all sales coming from the users themselves rather than from the company.

The website http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/ is an open source textbook organization where all the textbooks are free to download via PDF format.

The other 3 websites are book rental websites. The prices listed above do not include shipping. When you are comparing prices remember that if you buy the book you also get to sell it at the end of the semester, whereas if you rent it you simply send the book back at the end of the rental period.

Ultimately, buying your books on http://www.half.com may be your best bet, if you can remember to sell those books back on http://www.half.com at the end of the semester. Also, try to email your professor at least a week before classes start to get exact details of the textbook he/she intends to use and if they are fine with you getting an older edition to save money. If you can find a way to get your hands on an international version of the book, it typically would cost about 10%-20% of the normal copy, should be in English, and likely paperback.

Tags: books, college, professor, school, textbook, university

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 3:20 PM and is filed under Discounted Products, Finance & Money, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.