So you’ve forked over a huge chunk of change just for the privilege of going to school in the fall. And that was just tuition.
Then you had room and board, a computer, athletic fees, health fees, media fees, language lab fees, computer lab fees, fees for living on-campus, fees for living off-campus and fees for living, period. You’re young, in debt, and in college.
And now you’re standing in the campus bookstore and your Chem 101 book is how much?
As crazy expensive as the rest of your college life may be, nothing really hurts quite as much as those textbooks. Maybe it’s watching those $100 textbooks get rung up at the cash register in front of you—beep, there goes a hundred bucks, beep, there goes another hundred bucks—maybe it’s because no book, no matter how many pounds it weighs, should ever cost more than what the average person on food stamps is allowed to spend on food in an entire month.
Either way, before you know it, one trip to the campus bookstore, and you could be out $800.
Want to quit throwing money at the bookstore? We’d like to offer some out-of-the-box direction. If you think the biggest mistake you can make is buying new instead of used, you may want to read on.
Campus bookstores sell sweatshirts for $125 that you can get at JC Penney’s for $30. This should tell you something. And that something is our number one rule: Unless all other bookstores on the planet have suddenly evaporated, don't make your campus bookstore your first stop. Shop around, whether you're buying new or used. Or you could end up paying more than you need to on pretty much everything.
And most campus stores have a stricter return policy than Amazon or your local Barnes & Noble; if they accept returns at all, a lot of them charge a restocking fee to take your book back from you. Which means you basically paid them money just to hold a book for a little while. If you’re into that kind of thing, your local library will let you do it for free.
The early bird gets the worm. Which is great until you find out you need a different edition of the worm and your original worm is non-refundable. Or subject to a restocking fee. It’s a new school year, you’re eager (especially if you’re a freshman), you want to start off right, and you have visions of being ultra-prepared and reading ahead. We admire your ambition.
Use that energy to go to the gym or clean the bathroom.
Rule number two: Don’t buy anything until you’ve gone to class at least once.
Your syllabus for each class is going to be the most accurate and up-to-date reading list you have. Go off this, not what’s in stock under your course number in the campus bookstore. Some professors like to tweak their lecture plans up to the last minute and may have added texts or gotten rid of books they’d originally planned to use. Look over your reading assignments and buy only the books you need right away. Wait on the others, and buy them as you need them. That way if your prof changes the reading list as the semester goes along, you aren’t stuck with a bunch of books that it’s too late to return.
Things have changed since 1969. For instance, we’ve been through six more presidents. We now have an Internet. But if you buy that third edition of your history textbook because it’s $4.50 compared to the $90 12th edition your professor wants you to get, you’re going to be magically transported to a time before TiVo and reading about the ongoing Vietnam War, the U.S. mission to try to land the first humans on the moon, and the year’s best movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Saving $85 is a noble cause but possibly not worth failing your class.
And this doesn’t just go for history. New studies and discoveries can overhaul what your science and social science books have to say. Math books usually change problem sets. Literature anthologies revise who and what they include. Even when you think you’re safe getting that $1.00 used copy of The Great Gatsby since The Great Gatsby isn’t getting rewritten any time soon, you’re going to be in trouble when your professor quizzes you on the critical essays that were included with the fancy $22 edition that was sitting in the campus store.
To avoid edition shock, here’s a hardcore book shopper’s tip: Go to your campus bookstore with a notebook and a pen. Find all the titles that are listed on your syllabi, flip each book over, and write down the ISBN. That’s the 10-digit number under the bar code on the back of the book. Then when you’re doing your used book buying online, you can use the advanced search functions to search by ISBN. This’ll pull up the exact edition you need, no guesswork or combing through pages of search results, trying to find the right one.
So those are the basics: Editions matter, don’t buy a semester’s worth of books all at once, and always shop around before you drop any money at your campus bookstore. And learn to use ISBNs. They’ll keep you from ending up with out-of-date books that know less than you do.
ISBNs can help you on sites like BookFinder, which is a great place to start your used book search. BookFinder lists a lot of independent sellers who won’t turn up at the top of a Google search, and some of these guys have books that are insanely cheap.
But don’t think going used is your only money-saving option. Stay tuned for next month and Part 2, where we’ll give you the renegade strategies for getting your books as free or as dirt cheap as possible. And “buying used” isn’t one of them.