Finding Text Books Cheap Whenever One Is Paying $100 for Theirs
Getting accepted into a college and starting off your academic year these days is all about feeling battened on. What else do you expect - students pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees and their board and lodging, and if that isn't enough every teacher out there is comes up with bright ideas on the textbooks they need to buy for the year. It is possible that college students are just about the grumpiest bunch of forced customers you ever saw. They just have to buy those books; and the publishing companies that know this raise prices to as much as $200 a book. That doesn't really feel so good when all you get at end of the semester for them is perhaps $20 if you're lucky. Over the last 10 years, they've raised prices on college textbooks by about 5% each year. And this is while regular books anywhere are sold at great discounts - Amazon, Barnes & Noble, you name it. The fact that you have to pay sticker price and there isn't any discount forthcoming really gets people riled up. It should - parents routinely spend $1500 a year if not more just on college textbooks. Isn't there a way out? Is there anything that's in the works to help lower these prices? As it happens, there is quite a bit of momentum behind the scenes that attempts to make text books cheap and affordable to everyone.
The first thing that can hopefully make text books cheap is the unbundling rule that's just come into effect. This law aims at the practice many publishers have of not just selling you a textbook, but selling you a whole bundle of stuff with it - DVDs, workbooks and the like. If you want to textbook, you had better like paying them for all the extras. With the new law in place, manufacturers have to offer everything separately. There will be no more forced selling. Also, no more are you going to be given the list of books you need to buy only the day you show up in class the first time. They are going to give you much more time to shop around for cheap secondhand books. You'll get your list of books the day you register for your course. The thing is, there are more and more ways to get college text books cheap than ever before.
For instance, books that have gone out of copyright are available for download on the Project Gutenberg website. For a Kindle version or an iPhone version, you can quickly head over to ManyBooks.net. And fully copyrighted e-textbooks are easily available at half the sticker price too. Head over to CourseSmart.com for e-textbooks. Renting is a great option too. Try the website Rent-a-text.com. They'll let you have the book of your choice for half the cover price. And they won't even fine you for highlighting things. If you want to compare prices at all the online renting outlets, check out Chegg.com. The do great job; and also, their books are usually in great shape. For more ideas, try BookRenter.com or TextbookRentals.com. And Campus.com has great deals on secondhand books.