College is expensive. With tuition and room and board costing tens of thousands of dollars per year, the last thing anyone wants to do is spend thousands of dollars on textbooks. What a wake up call it was when I went to buy my textbooks during my first semester. I was used to $15-30 books. Why would I pay $100+ for something I’ll only need for a few months? Couldn’t I find most of this stuff on the internet anyway? Then and there, I made a resolution to myself to find a better and cheaper way for obtaining my books for the next semester. This lead me to one of the easiest ways to save money on college textbooks.
Buy used textbooks from Amazon. The campus bookstore is always going to have brand new copies, which cost the most, but chances are the textbook you need has been out for a while. This means you can probably find another student selling their slightly used copy on Amazon. Since people typically only use a textbook for one semester (I know I did), you can find fairly high quality used copies for a fraction of the price of new textbooks. By buying used on Amazon, I was able to save 30-50% off of the campus bookstore price. The key to buying on Amazon is reading the description to make sure there isn’t excessive damage to the book and to review the seller’s rating. Just remember, if the price is so low that it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
After buying so many used books, the entrepreneur in me got me thinking, why am I not selling my textbooks on Amazon? I knew there was demand from other frugal college students like myself, so why not get in on the action? Once the semester was over, I really had no need for most of my textbooks (again you really can find a lot of information online), so I simply used Amazon’s third party seller system to list and sell my textbooks. Most of my books sold pretty quickly, which allowed me to recoup even more of the initial cost. A few times I even made some money on the sale!
Since I’ve graduated, more and more sites have popped up offering cheap textbook rentals or even ebooks which can be another less expensive option. While renting textbooks does offer significant savings over buying new, if you perform a little extra work and search for a used textbook on Amazon, you will still probably get the best deal. Plus, if you rent the textbook you won’t be able to sell it later.
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