Textbook Central
Congress may or may not get to the bottom of the fiendish textbook
gouging visited upon our long-suffering students,
but we've come up with a few ideas...
1) Get your book title, author, edition, and ISBN as early as possible. That means registering as early as possible.
2) Libraries may actually have what you're looking for, and you may be able to take the book out for the entire semester.
3) Ebay will usually be your best price. A lot of wholesalers dump industrial quantities on Ebay, driving down prices. Make sure you leave plenty of time for the seller to be slow. While you're conducting the search, be sure to click over to half.com, where you can bag some deep discounts also. Search by ISBN, with dashes, because different editions can look quite similar:
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4) Try Abebooks. Their network of 13,500 bookstores is ideal for books both cheap and obscure. Our research puts their prices lower on average than the smaller search engines:
5) These guys are often as cheap, have a smaller network but faster shipping.
You can check both to see what you come up with:
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6) Digital Textbooks are available from many college bookstores. You decide if you want to stare at your computer screen for even longer than you are now. Liner notes are also an issue here. Another negative: You can't sell a digital book when you're done with it. Highlighting, copying and pasting passages, citations and references is a serious time-saver however.
The interesting thing about ICHAPTERS is that you can download one chapter of a book at a time. They are also particularly handy when your library's resources are exhausted and you need a piece of a book to complete a project:
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