Best College Textbook Sites
Alternatives to Your College Bookstore
A recent BusinessWeek.com article about Chegg.com, a site that allows students to buy and sell used textbooks and other school-related goods and services, spurred discussion on Digg.com. End result, you can find vastly different prices on multiple textbook sites, it depends on what you’re looking for. Send us your tips, site suggestions and experiences with these sites and we’ll add to the list.
Textbook Crawler / Price Comparison Sites
Ranked in order of mentions:
Abebooks.com
Bigwords.com
AddALL.com
TextbookCompare.com
BookFinder.com
Textbook Buy / Sell / Trade / Classifieds Sites
CollegeMedium.com
Tradeyourtextbook.com
CampusTrade.com
Textbookx.com
DormItem.com
ValoreBooks.com
DirectTextbook.com
Campusbooks.com
Other Textbook Sites
Half.com
Amazon.com
Barnes&Noble.com
Shopzilla.com
Individually Purchasing Textbook Chapters
ichapters.com
Canadian College / University Textbooks
Booksu.com
Tusbe.com
Textbooks From India
75-90% discounts. Identical to the US editions, but with grayscale photos and plain paper.
Firstandsecond.com/
Tips
Get a group together to pay cheap shipping.
Place an index card in the bulletin board of your department for the book you’re looking for.
The Future
Electronic versions of textbooks.
When you can’t find the book you need for free you can look online for International Edition College Textbooks which contain the same content as US Edition books but are much cheaper. They are usually printed on paperback and sometimes black and white print but the savings are up to 75%. The site I like best is WholesaleCollegeTextbooks.com but there are a few others that carry selection of textbooks. It may take up to 2 weeks to get delivery so please make sure you have time.
Most teachers do not care what edition of textbook you are using so long as you can do the assignments and read the required pages (not to mention passing the class). Waiting on the first day of class does put stress on you if there is homework the first day of class. I use StudentBookTrades.com to share and trade used college textbooks with my friends. They let me know if a previous edition worked for the class.
Here are some other great resources not mentioned in the article. Ipod’s new textbook app and studentbooksearch.com which is website to buy and sell directly to other students.
Listamillion.com classified ads is a wonderful site for buying and selling cheap items such as college textbooks. I was in need of cheap textbooks and while I was doing a search, I ran across listamillion.com. I was definately impressed with the selection of items on the site. There are so many people that are selling their stuff on sites like these for cheaper prices because they just want to get rid of these textbooks and get some money to buy more books for the next semester. College students are in need of money and textbook flipping is a main source of income. I would highly recommend you guys to check out listamillion classified ads. The full link: http://www.listamillion.com
Another useful price comparison website for used textbooks is http://UsedTextbooks.net. I think they also have a buyback price comparison search too.