Even if you've been planning for it for years and saving up, it really can get your goat when you head to the store and they tell you that each one of your college textbooks - calculus, microbiology, you name it - will cost at least $200. Somehow we are used to thinking of textbooks as what we spend on the side - you know, like a cheap laptop for class or stationery. Students easily spend $1500 a year on books, and if it is the hard sciences they happen to be in, the bill could easily top $4000 on textbooks. After what you pay your college in fees and your hostel for board and lodging, books happen to be the biggest college expense out there. And it keep rising too - at 5% a year. Over the last 20 years, college textbooks have grown into monsters three times what they used to cost. Of course, bad-tempered parents who have to pay all of us are making their ire heard come election day; and representatives in Congress are paying attention. The government now has set aside millions of dollars to try to seed a rental system to let students get cheap textbooks.
Students sometimes don't feel the real impact of a $1500 college textbook bill until after they've paid it. It could be a case of classic buyer's remorse, but they certainly carry it with them when the next semester starts, and it comes time to buy a new set of books. They feel that for all they wasted the first time around, they had better get a killer bargain this time around. Half.com and even Amazon are often great places to find a used copy. To some students, cheap textbooks aren't even good enough. They want them free. So they will put up posts on a college chat room and put out a call for students who would be willing to study together and share textbooks. There are three people sometimes sharing the same textbook in study together. It might not always work when things get busy during exam time, but the thought that they are saving hundreds of dollars get them to hunker down and manage.
Your college bookstore while it does carry several used copies of the textbooks you are prescribed, usually doesn't sell them very cheaply. A better idea would be to get online at one of several used textbook stores. As partial listing, try the GreenTextbooks.com, BookFinder.com, CheapestTextbooks.com or GetTextbooks.com. Of course it can be quite a hassle to look up all of these websites; what you need therefore is a meta-search engine that will give you prices from all of these places on one screen - try Bigwords.com.
How about dispensing with paper textbooks altogether, and going electronic to save money? There are plenty of publishing houses these days that put out electronic versions of their textbooks. Try CourseSmarts.com. If you just want to read a couple chapters of a book, try Cengage.com for renting out by the chapter.