Have you priced a college textbook lately? If not, let me be the first to inform you that they tend to be incredibly expensive. They can run upwards of $100 per book. This means that a college student could easily go broke buying their books. Luckily, here are some tips on How to Save Money on College Textbooks that you can use to save money without too much work.
How to Save Money on College Textbooks
Buy Used – Buying used textbooks is a great way to save money on them. Usually you can find them for as much as 75% cheaper than you would find them new. Keep in mind that with used textbooks, you may find writing in them and they may be missing a disc if they had one. This just means that you need to take a bit of care before purchasing. Check things out one-hundred percent.
Sites to Buy Used College Text Books:
Rent Your Textbooks – If you don’t want to spend a ton of money purchasing a textbook that you’ll only use once or twice, consider renting them. You can rent textbooks from Amazon and other book brokers for a fairly cheap price. Before you rent, make sure that you can return it in good condition. Otherwise, you may be forced to pay retail prices for the book.
Sites to Rent College Text Books:
Ask Friends and Family – Another way to save money on textbooks is to ask your friends and family if they happen to have a copy of the book you need. A lot of college classes, especially core classes, will use the same books. If they do happen to have a copy for you, they may give it to you for free or only charge you a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere. You can also use a swapping site to find a book. Open an account with an online book swap site such as BookMooch.com. You can post the textbooks you no longer need and use the points you acquire to obtain the textbooks that you need.
Go digital – We live in a digital age and because of that, a lot of text books are now offered in digital format. This can save you significantly over the cost of purchasing an actual textbook. The other benefit to having a digital textbook is that it can’t get ripped, stained, or otherwise ruined. Amazon offers FREE Kindle versions of many supplementary books needed for college classes, so check there before you buy supplementary books..
Share a Textbook – Another way to save money on textbooks is to share the cost (and book) with a friend. If you’re both taking the same class(es) and will agree to share the book equally so that you can both have study time, it could work out well. Just be sure that you trust the friend you are sharing with not to hog the book all of the time or your grades could be in trouble. you can open an account with an online book
Sell Back Used Textbooks – While this one may take a while to actually see the savings, selling your textbooks to someone else or to a book broker can be a great way to save. You won’t get back every dime that you spent, but getting any money back at all helps you save in the long run. We have had very good luck using Half.com to sell old college textbooks.
No matter how you look at it, college textbooks are expensive. Doing what you can to help keep the cost down is the only way that you’ll make them even remotely affordable. Do you have any other tips for saving money on your college textbooks? I’d love to hear them if so!
More Ways to Save Money in College:
25 Ways for College Students to Save Money
How to Save Money on College Textbooks
How to Save Money on College Expenses
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Nicess says
Very useful article for college student!
Debra @ Bowl Me Over says
We just finished helping our daughter pay for college and it’s unbelievable how expensive everything is! Your tips are terrific and I hope they help lots of people think outside the box and save some $$’s!! Wanted to pop by and let you know I’m featuring your post on #FoodieFriDIY this week! Please come back and share again, we’ll be live at 6pm pacific time!
laura {not a trophy wife} says
Amazon has worked well for our daughter. I can’t believe text books are not ALL digital.. yet! laura
Charlott says
12 or so years ago I did the buy used and sell back thing. I recommend buying books you may want to keep for future reference. My husband usually rents his from Chegg.