If you buy from the campus bookstore you can expect to pay through the nose. The cheapest routes to go are:
- Buying directly from other students (I just got a $125 textbook for $65 this way)
- Buying from Amazon, eBay, half.com, borders.com, etc. The prices on those sites are often some of the lowest you're going to find
- Renting textbooks. This is by far the cheapest option but the downside is that you can't keep the books or sell them off to mitigate costs, nor can you write in them.
Also note that you can often get away with using the international edition or past editions of textbooks, which are usually significantly cheaper. Past editions are especially cheap and can often be obtained for 10% or less of what the current edition costs. Just make sure that if you go that route that you ask your professor if it's okay first as sometimes textbooks can actually have significant changes between editions (this is rare, but that $125 textbook I was talking about is one such textbook. In over 20 years of publication it's only had four editions. I've read the third and fourth editions and the differences are absolutely leviathan).
Finally, I've found that if possible it's a good idea to hold off on buying books to make sure you really need them. A lot of cIasses say you should get the textbook simply because the professor would feel guilty if he didn't use one, but in reality the book can be safely disregarded. Talking to other students who have taken the cIass is the best way to find out if a book is really needed or not. Another good way that I've found is to go to the campus bookstore and browse the used selection for that textbook. Look inside the books for things like underlining, highlighting, and margin notes. If there's a lot of those things in most of the books then the book is definitely needed for cIass If the used books are indistinguishable from the new books, you can probably rest easy putting that purchase aside.
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