College Textbooks

Speakeasy

Sorry if this is a reposted thread.

My girlfriend needs textbooks at the end of the month, and asked if I could go and find them. Now I checked the usual places (Amazon, Half.com), but was wondering if any of you had another site to go to for cheap books. Google only brings up either what looks like fake sites or redirection pages.

Brodo Faggins

Go check her college's facebook network, there's usually a group dedicated to this sort of thing. Also craigslist, ebay, etc.

musanman

This may be whoring, but if anybody has taken any college math classes and would like to donate them to a high school math classroom I would love to have them.

Iroh

I use Amazon for all of my textbooks. There are a lot of shops there that will sell them to you dirt cheap, often still in the shrink wrap. They all have feedback ratings, and the payment is handled through Amazon, so it's a really safe way to go about it.

alcoholic_engineer

http://www.abebooks.com/


Try this place out. I saved literally hundreds of dollars using this last year. They come in softcover as opposed to hardcover, but are essentially identical in any other way.

Treeloot

www.allbookstores.com lets you search through a whole bunch of online bookstores to find the best prices.

mcdermott

Treeloot wrote: »

www.allbookstores.com lets you search through a whole bunch of online bookstores to find the best prices.

Holy fuck. Out of curiosity, how do they manage prices like these? I mean, I see a book listed there for $30 that lists at $130...and it's not like there's a new edition out. I know there's some markup on textbooks at the retailer level, but shit. I just want to make sure these aren't books that like, "fell of a truck" or something.

Brodo Faggins

They're probably used ones college kids have sold to them. I remember a business advertised at my school that was similar to this; they offered students cash for books, and turned around and resold them at a slightly higher cost.

mcdermott

Brodo Faggins wrote: »

They're probably used ones college kids have sold to them. I remember a business advertised at my school that was similar to this; they offered students cash for books, and turned around and resold them at a slightly higher cost.

Oh no, I looked. After a couple clicks into the site that had them that cheap it turns out they were softcover international editions...so that makes sense. They were listed as "new" so I was just confused (and on the first page they weren't labeled as internationals).

Now, can I assume that if these are shipping from the US that customs has already been taken care of (or at least that somebody else is on the hook if they haven't been)? I remember hearing rumors about people getting tagged for duties on editions like this before, but I assume that's from when you actually order them from overseas.

Anyway, I think I'll go this route on every book I can this semester...the only reason I'm hesitant is that I'm one of those wackos that actually keeps all his books (and I've actually used them for reference) but I'd probably not care if they're softcovers. Is the binding generally decent on those?

Shazkar Shadowstorm

Sometimes my softcovers hold up better than my hardcovers. Maybe I'm more careful with them... I don't know.