Slatalla writes that buying required text books at the campus bookstore can cost the average college student $700 to $1,000 a year, according to a Congressional advisory committee report released in May.
Although oodles of online stores and marketplaces — like Biblio.com, Abebooks.com and A1books.com — have in the past five years built large inventories of both used and discounted new textbooks, there’s no single site where you can always get the best deal.....Comment: College textbooks are expensive for reasons too numerous to go into here. But even for the rest of us, these links are useful. Bookfinder especially is interesting when you want to find a really unusual book. JAD
Maketextbooksaffordable.org (is) a site operated by a coalition of student public interest research groups.....
Bookfinder.com, an umbrella search site that sifts through the inventories of hundreds of thousands booksellers worldwide, started a simple, easy-to-use textbook search tool. The way it works: enter a title, I.S.B.N. or author’s name in Bookfinder’s textbooks search box to navigate a huge database of 125 million new and used books. You can compare prices, shipping costs and the availability of less expensive editions published overseas....
A Bookfinder search last week for “Genki II: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese II” turned up 24 new and used copies, at prices ranging from $20.94 at Amazon.com to $110.62 at Amazon.de. For each of the 24 copies, total price (including shipping) is listed on a single page, along with information about how soon the book will ship. Some sellers offer expedited delivery. Amazon, for instance, offers overnight delivery and discounts of up to 30 percent off on new copies of 200,000 textbooks.....
A new copy of a first-year textbook like, say, “Biology, seventh edition” by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece, which lists for $153.33, was available for $57.45 last week at Valorebooks.com.
1 comment:
Hi John,
There's another option, which may be the cheapest of all for many textbooks - renting them. There's a new online textbook rental service called TextBookFlix (http://www.textbookflix.com), which offers over two million used books and 800,000 new book titles. Students are welcome to check it out and compare the renting prices against buying new/used textbooks.
They're not only cost-saving service, but also an eco-friendly one. They work with Eco-Libris (http://www.ecolibris.net) to plant a tree for every textbook that is rented on their website.
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