Cheap Textbooks - best deals are online
Shopping for cheap textbooks can be easily accomplished online. The prices of textbooks online often are far cheaper than the prices of textbooks purchased at local college and university bookstores. With a knowledge of all the tools and websites (including foreign sites) at your disposal, you'll soon be purchasing all your cheap textbooks on the Internet.
To see how cheap textbooks can be when purchased online, I did a non-statistical comparison. Surprisingly, 18 out of 20 college textbooks were at least $10 cheaper when purchased online than at local college bookstores.
Of course, when starting out online shopping for cheap textbooks, you should always first check out Amazon and Barnes & Noble as a comparison to all other websites. These are the college textbook “superstores” and, because of the volume of business they do, they often can offer textbooks that are far cheaper than their competitors.
Besides the main Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites, cheap textbooks can also be found on a number of foreign websites. One of our favorites is the U.K. Amazon website. Most foreign-sold college textbooks are definitely cheaper than their North American counterparts.
Note: At one point, buying cheap textbooks from overseas sites was considered a "grey-market" practice. However, this is no longer the case. Gone are the days when textbook publishers could take advantage of differential textbook prices offered to foreign and North American students—a 1998 US Supreme Court ruling took care of that. Even with shipping (around £4 per book), the college textbooks are generally at least 30% cheaper than American websites.
Students and others also have the option of purchasing used cheap textbooks from third parties who have accounts with the major websites. One of the biggest third party vendors that list their used textbooks with Amazon is A1 Books. On Amazon, all sellers are rated based on how quickly they ship their products and in what condition they arrive. |