College Textbooks: How To Get Them Cheaply?

If you are a college student you already know how ridiculously expensive textbooks are. The new textbooks are often well over $100 and even used ones in the college bookstores are usually over $50 (with some around $100). Yesterday I noticed all this at a local college bookstore. Also a lot of students I talked to were complaining about textbook costs. Often they will spend over a $1000 per semester for textbooks.

Okay, enough with the lecture. What I want to know is if there is a way to get textbooks cheap. Yeah, I know they can be purchased on Half.Com or eBay for a lot less (I've sold some there myself) but is there ANOTHER source for cutrate college textbooks? One solution is to buy the overseas versions that the textbook companies sell at a discount in foreign countries but how to get them? Also, aren't there warehouses with lots of recent mint condition textbooks stored by the textbook companies? Is there some way to purchase the stored textbooks at a bargain rate?

If anybody has ideas on this, please post them here. Also if you are a college student, feel free to post your textbook horror stories here as well.

And I really hate it when the bookstore offers me about 20% of what I paid for a book when I sell it back.

Then the college bookstore turns around and sells it back again for about 70% of the new price. I was at a college bookstore today and some of the USED medical textbooks were selling for over $100. And I bet they only paid about $30 for those same books. I love how profs always lecture the rest of the world from their ivory towers about ethics and yet colleges pull off scams like this on a regular basis. They are making a MINT!!!

I'm a college teacher, and I can tell you that textbook manufacturers court us like drug companies court doctors.

Like with "study forums" in Hawaii? BTW, what happens to all the textbook editions no longer in use? The college bookstores won't buy them back so what do students do with them?

They get you coming and going. I'm working on an associate's degree in the medical field and the books are unbelievably expensive. I think my priciest one so far was $135 and it was used. Did you know there's quite a black market in textbooks? Thieves steal them from students at one campus, then take them to another campus and sell them to the bookstore. I never let mine leave my sight.

Textbooks are pretty much a monopoly operation. Base level teachers just get free copies of the books and usually special treatment like special hospitality rooms at conventions. The higher up the ladder you go, and the more perks you get.

Most old college textbooks end up in the landfill. While information and style changes dictate some textbook revisions, many manufacturers issue new texts specifically to kill the used textbook market. Proof of this is that they always pull the old version, making it impossible to make it a required text for a class. Most instructors don't like the frequent changes anymore than the students, as it means we have to revise assigned reading lists, chapter assignments and end of chapter review assignments.

The reason the books are so expensive is the same reason a dog licks himself. The book manufacturers have a captive market. You MUST buy the specific book they produce, so a book that would bring $19 at Barnes and Noble may go for $95 to $100 when it is a required text for a class. Book manufacturers do everything they can to kill alternate supply sources for their books.

One nice thing is most colleges prohibit professors from assigning their own books to students. This keeps people from bumping their book sales.

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