[QueenAngie]

With this new semester, how much did you pay for your college textbooks.

Where do you buy them?

College bookstore?

Online?

Ebay?

Get them included with your college tuition?

Use the library's copy?

Get a copy from the professor?

How much did you spend?

[QueenAngie]

DS#1 had one new book he had to purchase for this semester.
Guess the cost of this one book.....

$525.00 for one book.

Some book, huh?

Well, the other option was that the college has the copyrights to this particular book and will give the student a copy for only $12x.xx
with a credit card. Not cash. Not a check.

Needless to say, we are going with the $12x.xx 'cheaper' one.

What about you?

[etali]

Textbooks are obscenely expensive these days! I've never seen one for that price though!

I'm doing a part time course, and there's a huge list of 'required' reading, but most of it you only need to read one chapter out of the entire book, so I try to get an idea of which ones will be referenced often, and which ones you don't really need - buy the important ones, get the others from the library, or swap with other students.

[MissyChrissy]

I just finished college in December, and every semester I spent between 400-900 in books. I don't miss that.

But cripes--500 for one book? You gotta be kidding me!

[swt1899]

I remember paying $175 for a paperback calculus book. I couldn't believe it! And then when I tried selling it back they offered just $50! I was mad! So I asked them how much they were selling a used one for and they were selling used ones for $100. I sold mine to another student for $90.
All of my science/biology books were expensive. I hated that. Don't miss that at all.
$500+ for a book seems rediculous. Can you find it on Amazon.com used??? Sheesh!

[ARTinspired]

I usually paid around 200-300 with a full load on books. BUT i am an art major so a lot of my classes either had small books or none at all. In the end though, i ended up making up for not paying so much with the cost of supplies for the classes which was usually around 100.00 per art class. So with those included it was around 600.00-700.00 per semester. The college i went to didn't rent out text books so we had to buy ours. My sister was fortunate enough to be able to rent most of her's which saved her a ton in the end. I wish all colleges would let you rent your text books or at least a majority of them, i think it's a great idea. Being that quite a few college students have no help from their parents, money is always tight and choosing to pay for books/courses at the same time means working long hours out of school. And depending on the job, i've found that that can hinder your performance in both work and school. It also contributed to me becoming "burnt out" on school once. So it's either pay then and work hard or pay later with school loans and hope you get a job soon after you graduate so the intrest doesn't build up too much. = \ i'm not sure which is the better choice >< lol

I also worked at the college bookstore for a time. Quite a few of the students went to find them online. Many schools use the same editions and if you sell them online you get more than if you sell it back to the store or a company. Most said they use ebay. I haven't tried it yet but for the books over 200.00 that's where i'll be looking from now on. I know a lot of the math text books and science ones were crazy expensive. The nursing text books were also quite expensive. First semsmter nursing one semester had to purchase at least 7 text books for two classes. The rest were optional. Granted, they used most of the same text books the next semsmter but to spend around 600.00-800.00 for two classes at one time is quite a bit. I advised them to invest in rolling backpacks. I ended up just going to grab them off the shelves myself for them when they asked so they wouldn't have to carry them around the store themselves. They probably weighed over 50-60 pounds. ><

[Samual]

I still have all my books from university so that my students can use them as further research, I have on for general biology that was £95, but apart from that the rest are very cheap, £40ish so no complaining there. I only had ten modules a year as well, so it wasn't much of a cost for me. My textbooks for Cell Biology were all free though as our lecturer was the main author.