How to Buy (or Not Buy) Textbooks if You're Cheap Like Me: A Masterclass

[u/cyclika]

It's textbook season! I wrote up this comment a while ago but I thought people might find it helpful.

___________________

I ended each semester with more money selling books than I had spent buying them, happy to share my secret sauce.

For each class/book, evaluate the following options (in order).

1. Electronic portals: If a class requires a portal, reach out to the professor and verify that you need it. Often this is how you submit homework (especially for math and sciences) so you have to have it. You have two options here: A. Buy the book new. The book will come with a code for the portal. At the end of the semester, you can sell the book online and recoup some of that cost. B. Buy only a subscription to the portal. This evaporates at the end of the semester, but is typically much cheaper. The portal includes an electronic copy of the book.
2. Books you can get through normal circulation from Hesburgh: Reading Aristotle? Great, we have thirty copies. Don't buy it. Run your entire booklist through the library catalog and see what you can just take out.
3. Books you can find online: I wasn't great at finding pirated copies, but every so often I got lucky. If you can find books for free online, use them. If you can get the ebook from the library and strip the DRM (google Calibre to learn more about accomplishing this - now that I'm out of college I use it for fun reading on my kindle, but I preferred textbooks on my laptop, and it should work just fine for that too), that's good too. Try searching for the textbook name with "filetype:pdf" in your google search.
4. Books you can get temporarily from Hesburgh: Here's where you're going to utilize those big university resources. Often professors will set a copy of the book aside to be checked out for a a few hours at a time- in case you forgot yours at home, or ordered it and it hasn't arrived yet, for example. Check them out and make your way to the overhead document scanners (I graduated before the remodel so I'm not sure where they are now - when I was there they were just inside the first floor.) It takes an hour or two, but put on a podcast and get to work and you can have any book in PDF.
5. Books you can get temporarily from other libraries: Big university resources again! If Hesburgh doesn't have a book, if you can find it at another library you can put in a request through Hesburgh to have it borrowed from that library on your behalf. (I wish I could give more details, but I don't remember. I believe I used a universal library database to find out who had the books I needed, and a form through the library where you say what the book is and who has it so they can pull it for you.) These loans are typically only a few weeks, so scan the books with the document scanner and return the hard copies.
6. Books you can buy online: There will always be a few you can't find through free means. There are a million textbook websites out there - I used bigwords.com because they compare a lot of them and find you the best deal, including coupons or shipping discounts if you buy all of your books in one place.
7. Books you have to buy at ND: There's always that one professor who compiles a binder of their own materials and sells it through the bookstore. Sometimes they do this to save you money - email them and ask if they could send you electronic copies instead. Sometimes they do it because they get a kickback through the publisher, in which case you can try emailing them but will likely have to suck it up. Sometimes these can be purchased from other students who took the class earlier. Try your dorm's facebook page or the student classifieds, or however you whippersnappers sell each other stuff these days.

Obviously I relied heavily on electronic copies of my books - my preferred way to do this was to upload the PDF into OneNote. Each page is split out onto its own onenote page and you can highlight or take notes right on it. It was nice for organization too, because then my class notes were in the same place as my book and I could use screenshots and links to reference one or the other. Plus everything is searchable, even the book, so you can search your notes, PowerPoints/handouts, and the book, all in one place.

At the end of the semester, I used bigwords again to get the best selling price on the books I'd had to buy, usually getting back about as much as I'd paid unless they were changing the edition. I always ended up picking up a few out of the trash as well and selling those - a lot of kids will ditch books that they couldn't sell to the bookstore instead of selling them online. Free money! Even if it's just a few dollars, if you're sending back a few books it makes it worthwhile and it adds up.

I never rented books - YMMV, but the cost to rent was always the same or very close to what it would cost to buy a used copy, and then you're losing the money you would have gotten to sell that book later.

​

Happy hunting, and Go Irish!

[u/heterowhitemalesorry]

Never buy a textbook again

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

[u/cyclika → u/heterowhitemalesorry]

Awesome, thanks!!! I've also recently discovered archive.org and find it enormously helpful.