by H. Marlow

Created on: September 15, 2009   Last Updated: September 18, 2009

Though I am not in school anymore, I remember freshman year, going into the campus bookstore and my jaw dropping open at the prices on the books I was supposed to buy. And since I didn't know any better, I did buy them, spending about $400 altogether. Completely ridiculous! The next semester I thought that there must be a cheaper way to do this. So I did some research and found that textbooks are way cheaper online than in the stores. There are three major websites that I would always check and those were

Half.com, Ebay, andAmazon.com. These websites allow users to sell their used textbooks for a very cheap price! Alternately, when you are done with your textbooks, you should resell them on these websites and receive way more money than you would if you sold it back to your school bookstore.

Now, there is a trick to getting the right book for your class. Many of the books have many different editions that have different material in them, so it is important that you get the right one. One way to make sure that you get the right textbook is to find out the ISBN, located on the back of the textbook where the barcode is. Find this code for each of your books and go to those three websites, type in the code and your book, if they have it, should pop up immediately. There is no searching through endless editions trying to find the right one. Another way to get cheap textbooks is to search ebay for the international editions of these textbooks. Most of these books ship from Japan, and though they look different on the outside, they have all the same material as the U.S. version. Get these if you can find them as they will save you up to 50% or more! Most of the books that have international versions are in the sciences, and these books can cost up to $150. Though if you get the international versions, they may only cost you about $60. I think the only reason that these books are cheaper is that the pages aren't as colorful or shiny as their U.S. counterparts, which doesn't really matter.

I hope these tips will help you as you start college, and help those who have been in college for a while. I didn't know anything about how to get books for cheap when I first started and I really wish I had. I would be hundreds of dollars richer now!

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