IT Milk: entry

Buy Your Textbooks For Penn State

The new semester is just a couple of months away and you’ve finished registering for all your courses. All that’s left to do now is buy your Penn State textbooks. Depending on how and where you buy your textbooks, you can save $300 or $500 on book costs. Below I will show you how to save money on textbooks.

The Best Way To Buy Textbooks

First of all, don’t go to to Penn State Bookstore to buy your textbooks. Penn State is not necessarily ripping you off, but you can find much better deals elsewhere outlined below. The Penn State bookstore is just doing their job as a retail business, and they charge fair prices in terms of retail prices for new and used textbooks. But buying retail is for amateurs.

I stare at my friends and classmates in shock when they go to the bookstore the first day of class and buy a brand new textbook for $180. They come to me and say, “Why are books so damn expensive!?” Then I tell them I had bought the same book for $25 on the internet and they get pissed. After, I have to tell the same advice dozens of times to various students.

So here are two cheaper ways to buy textbooks:

• Buy bundles of textbooks from other students. You can usually find these postings on bulletin boards around the Penn State campus. The best part about this is that you can haggle with them for the price and get these textbooks really cheap. No shipping fees either. The disadvantage of this method is that you won’t always find the textbooks that you are looking for.
• The next method is to buy the books online from sites like Abebooks.com or Half.com. These are online marketplaces that connect individual buyers and sellers, and you will find great deals whether you buy your textbooks used or new. I usually get several of my textbooks used for less than $7 each from these sites.

Save Money on Textbooks at Abebooks.com

Find The Textbooks For Your Penn State Courses

Now, this is where we have to borrow the Penn State Bookstore for a useful purpose. Go to the Penn State Bookstore Textbooks website and search the database for the textbooks for your course name and course section. For some reason, the bookstore website doesn’t reveal the ISBN and has concatenated versions of the textbook title. But since you have both the author name and a general idea of the textbook title, you will be able to find the textbook when you search on other websites.

The Best Time To Buy Textbooks

There’s definitely a good and a bad time to buy textbooks if you are buying textbooks online. The basic principle of supply and demand is in action with the online textbook market. When students are all in a last-minute rush to buy their textbooks, the prices are highly inflated. On the other hand, if you buy your textbooks one or two months in advance, you get the best deals.

So buy your textbooks in between semesters when other students are trying to get rid of their textbooks but before everyone is competing against each other to buy what’s left. If you monitor the trends in textbook sale prices over time, you can see the dip then a radical increase.

Buy textbooks for less at Abebooks.com