Florida Education Options: Saving Money on College Textbooks

September 11, 2010

Saving Money on College Textbooks

If you have a college student in your family then I don't have to tell you the high cost of textbooks. Buying your books directly from the college bookstore can cost you a fortune. Although school bookstores often offer used textbooks as an option, the don't always have them in stock. As a mother of three college students I found the best deal was to search online for the best deal on my children's college textbooks.

Check your course information and get the ISBN number of the required book. If only have the title it can be risky selecting the book online since there are always numerous editions and slight variations of what appears to be the same book. ISBN is the International Standard Book Number, a 10-digit number that uniquely identifies books and book-like products published anywhere in the world. Pick up any book on your bookshelf and you'll find that it has an ISBN. Older books may have a 13 digit ISBN number and this will work to search for your book as well.

Once you have the ISBN number search online for the best deal on the book. Amazon, half.com, and Ecampus are all good website options. If you have two weeks or more before you need to purchase the books you can choose individual sellers from Amazon or eBay and get a better price. You may need to buy from someone who is far away and you will need to make sure you you account for shipping time. Bigwords is a good website for searching for book deals because it lets you compare prices from numerous stores.

After the college course you will probably want to resell the books and recoup some of your money. Again one option is to try and resell the books back to the college bookstore. Unfortunately I found that the schools are continually changing the book requirements for a course and they may not be interested in buying back the book that they just sold to you for over a $100 just weeks earlier!

For whatever reason the bookstores I use to buy my books are not always the stores that offer the best deal on buybacks. For the most part I resell the college textbooks two different ways.

My number one choice for selling a used textbook is Bookbyte. You need a certain amount of trust in selling back your books online and Bookbyte has earned my trust time and time again. I had a really bad experience with Ecampus, where they took over two months before they sent me the check and that just doesn't work for me. To resell a book at Bookbyte follow these simple steps:

Go to Bookbyte and open an account. The account isn't strictly necessary but it allows you to check on the status of your orders.
Just click on the "Sell Textbooks", then add the ISBN numbers in the area specified. They have two options- a single ISBN or multiple ISBNS.
After you add the ISBN numbers they will show the title of the book and what they are paying for it. If you choose to sell the books back to them they have a postage label for you to print out and attach to the shipping box. I like this feature because it means you don't have any out of pocket expense.
Bookbyte offers a choice of them sending the check to you or paying you through your PayPal account. I always use the PayPal account, it's faster and I don't have to go to the bank. It usually takes 2-3 weeks from the time I send the books until I receive payment. One thing that can slow down the transaction is trying to sell the book as new if it is used, so be honest about the book condition.

You may want to sell the book back directly on Amazon. You can set up an Amazon account for free and then choose the price and shipping options. The only tricky part with selling on Amazon is you need to keep a close eye on the account so that you can ship out the books as soon as someone places an order.

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Education Options

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