(tillwe)
Finding the best textbooks prices just got a whole lot easier now that colleges are required to provide students with a list of required textbooks when they register for classes. The requirement was mandated back in the 2008 as part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, but only took effect this year.
Proponents say the law will give students more time to take advantage of textbook buy-back programs, book rentals and prices that are often lower online than in college bookstores. They expect it will also force professors to pay more attention to the cost of books they assign.
“Until this year, many schools didn’t give the book list until the week before classes, and you really had no choice but to head to the college bookstore,” says Christine Frietchen, editor in chief of ConsumerSearch.com.
The best way to find cheap books is to start hunting early. You’re not a unique snowflake, and there are plenty of other students scrounging for the deal you want. If you can resist the urge to highlight and doodle, consider a textbook rental service like Chegg. For everyone else, comparison shop just like you would for any other product. Grab your textbook’s ISBN and plug it into traditional sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and AbeBooks. Then, look for a better price through services like Half and CheapestTextBook. If you decide to buy used, carefully read both the product’s description and the seller’s reviews. Once you find a reasonable price, grab it before it disappears.
College students may get break on textbook expenses [USA Today]
20 U.S.C. § 1015b [U.S. Code]
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Best thing to do? Wait until the class starts to see if you even need the damn books. I can’t tell you how many generic classes I took where the instructor gave you everything you needed in the class notes, making the $70 “required” text book for the class a completely worthless purchase, even if you got it used for far less.
I passed an entire Biology elective class without buying the $90 text book, using the Internet and Wikipedia, along with the copious notes the instructor provided. Yes, I got an A in the class. When the class came to an end, the book store was only buying back 30 copies of the book, so students rushed there after the final, while I took a nice, easy stroll to my car to go home.
Don’t make me waste my video game money on a book if you’re just going to reproduce it in your PowerPoint for the class.
Another pro tip: if you have to buy the books, look to see if the instructor is teaching the next levels up, which might allow you to reuse the same books. I did that for my two English generics in college, and while I hated reading nothing but books about Native Americans (it was her theme/agenda), it saved me ~$100 the semester after the 101 class by being able to use the same books for the 201 class she taught. My C++ instructor made it a point to have us buy a book that could be used for all three levels of the C++ courses the university offered.
Just gotta make sure you register as early as you can so you can ensure you’ll have them as an instructor.
In addition to helping students save money, HEOA contains another provision that will help end textbook rip-offs for good. The law requires publishers to inform professors of textbook prices and revision histories when marketing books. Research by the PIRGs found that publishers frequently withhold this information, leaving faculty in the dark about how much books actually cost.
Textbook prices are out of control because students are captive consumers. A third party (professors) assigns books on their behalf, so students have little choice but to pay whatever absurd price publishers charge. Requiring publishers to disclose their prices will help mediate this market failure by ensuring professors have the information they need to consider cost on behalf of students. Over time, basic economics suggests that this will force publishers to bring their prices down overall.
I manage a college textbook store (don’t hate, it feeds my family and keeps a roof over their heads). I’m a recent college grad, so I’m all for lower prices on textbooks – I’m very serious about checking online prices for textbooks we sell here in the store and cutting our profit margins to be competitive – so I have no problem with the general idea of this law.
There is one big problem with the law in that that it does not have guidelines for professors about changing their book orders. We get thousands (literally thousands) of textbook requests from professors the month before classes start. If students can register for Fall classes in February and professors have to have book information in by then, what we are afraid of is that professors will just put in a title to be compliant, and change it just before classes start to the one they really want (or the one the publisher rep has wooed them into using). By then we’ve spent thousands of dollars on inventory that we’ll have to send back to publishers and wholesalers if the books are changed, and worst of all some students would have already bought their books and won’t know about the change until the 1st day of class. Then they’ll be scrambling to return the book to the Amazon or eBay seller. It’s up to the department at the schools to keep the book orders consistent and orderly, and in my experience they don’t do a great job.