Oolala, summer is staying while Fall is coming! How can I explain how much I love schools and having classes without getting those “are you serious?” eyes? Well, putting my excitement aside, here comes the worries about new semester “bleeding” for every budget tied college folks. Everyone knows how ridiculous textbooks prices are!
If you are one of us, you are in the right page. Here we goes and starts saving!
I’m an art students, so many of my classes doesn’t need a textbook, so for the coming semester I need two textbooks. Here is the one, for Human Anatomy! Let’s take this one as the example. You go to your campus bookstore website, normally they have scary number. Don’t laugh, I rent all my textbooks from them my first semester in America. This one they rent out for 76.56 dollars, almost the same price for etextbook rent.
If you don’t know Bookfinder.com, you should go and check it right now. Copy the ISDN and search in bookfinder. You can find different offer from a big number of websites. Much better than you search them one by one and compare the prices by yourself.
Here is the result! You got a brand new one at around 53 and a second hand one at 49. Pay attention here! The second hand one shows it is international edition. Here is how AbeBooks describes international edition textbooks:
“Looking for affordable textbooks? Consider international editions – textbooks that have been published outside the US. These books are usually significantly cheaper than textbooks published in the US. Offering tremendous value, international edition textbooks are created to be sold in different regions and are often printed on cheaper paper and are usually softcover. The content may be the same as the U.S. version, or may have differences such as the book cover, ISBN, pagination, or region code
Customers located in the US can now purchase international edition textbooks. However, note that the publishers of international editions generally do not authorize the sale and distribution of international editions in Canada and such sale or distribution may violate the copyrights and trademarks of the publishers of such works.”
But wait a second, can we find cheaper ones? Here using google, we can find the ISDN for international edition. which is usually not the same as the edition we find on campus bookstore.
Now we got the ISDN, go back and check in bookfinder again, and that’s where we were leaded. Here is one at 29.99, second hand in Amazon. Sorry I got the one at 28 dollar.
Final action, order it. The shipping fee is 3.99 dollars, so the totally fee is 31.99 dollars. Compared to the beginning 75 dollars for rent, we got our own book for even less than half price. After semester goes, you can sell it again, and get some more money back.
Well, that’s all about searching cheap textbooks. I’m sure there are many others ways you can find good prices, I have a friend who can find free etextbooks online and you can also check libraries. Yeah, I know I have another textbook I need to get, it’s for 19 century European Art History. Since I just got the call from my campus library that they are holding the book for me, so… I’m ready for my new exciting semester!
Enjoy your rest of the holiday!