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Aug 30, 2012

Students Shopping for Textbooks

For parents with children starting a new term of college/university and the students themselves. Aren't those text books always so expensive? Most students just payed course fees in the thousands and now need to buy a few hundred dollars worth of books, even buying all used books will cost an arm and a leg.

There are two pieces of helpful advice that will hopefully make your textbook purchasing less painful:

1) Do not buy any of your text books until after the first class.
Wait until you have attended the first class because course outlines have a record of being out of date, by any amount of time, even up to years, and since the update the course required text could have changed and you don't need to get stuck with an out-of-date book. Also, any prepared professor will come with a copy of the correct textbook to show his/her class, although many different versions of a text may have nearly identical titles, the covers are typically unique and this will aid you in acquiring the appropriate text and save yourselves the headache of being lost in the text and having to go back and return a book and all that hassle.

If you've already bought your textbooks before the first class, do not open the wrapper, as long as you don't and you still have the receipt you will be able to return any textbooks if need be without hassle and buy the appropriate text before next class.

2) There's more than one place to buy your textbooks.
You have the option to shop around and compare prices on textbooks. The campus bookstores aren't the only place that sell your textbooks. There is also the online book store that I have come to understand offers better prices sometimes. Another option for buying your books is definitely off campus book stores, like; Coles, Chapters, used (from second, third... year students) or any number of online sources.

Consider making a list of all your required texts and go comparative shopping across your multiple options, this time spent could save you hundreds of dollars in textbooks.

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