Pragmatic Finance

One of the major expenses for a college student each semester is the purchase of textbooks. It seems that they are getting more costly every year. Sometimes it costs over $100 for the latest edition of some book whose only update was a few fixed errors from the previous edition. And then if you try to sell them back at the end of the semester to the bookstore you are normally offered only a fraction of the cost.

A great alternative to using the bookstore at your campus is to buy and sell the books online. Not only can you get them much cheaper, you can sell your used books for higher prices than the bookstore will normally give you. Sometimes you can also get paperback or other versions of the book that are exactly the same but much cheaper.

I have been doing this at Amazon.com for the last few years and it has saved me a bundle. It’s very easy to search for the books you need and you can look through the different sellers of new and used copies. Having the ISBN number on the back of the book makes it really easy to make sure you have the right book. When the semester is over you can also sell books through the same marketplace. It’s a simple process, after listing you get an email when it sells and you mail the book off. Every two weeks they deposit the funds into your checking account. Half.com seems to be another popular choice. Between this and Amazon there should be a large enough selection to find the ones you need. These two are probably also the best to sell on that I know of as they both have a very large customer base.

When trying to find the best deal on buying textbooks, you can use websites that aggregate a listing of all the major online bookstores. Several I have found are BestBookBuys, CampusI, and FetchBook. You can search for a book on these sites and see the prices, availability, and condition so you can get the best possible deal out there.

If you do buy and sell to the bookstore at your campus, realize that you are paying a very large surcharge for a little convenience. In my opinion, for the time it takes to search for books you want to buy or ship the ones you are selling, it is definitely not worth it.