Your room is littered with bright yellow and blue bags, as you mull over a long receipt in a corner. You spent $200 on books for only one class?! Ridiculous. Coupled with the enormous bill you just paid the UC Regents last month, your finances aren’t looking that great.
Sharp increases in UC tuition are only one part of the financial strains on students and their families. High textbook prices have also frustrated students and threatened to empty their wallets. Currently, the easiest way for students to buy textbooks is through UCSD Bookstore or Groundwork Books. However, as most students who have bought and sold their books through the bookstore at the beginning and end of each quarter know, this is not the most favorable way to obtain books, or to sell them back after a class.
Students have expressed concern over the small amount UCSD Bookstore pays them for their used books in comparison to the price they resell them at.
However, there are alternatives to paying full price or close to full price for textbooks on campus, and many can be found on the Internet.
Recently, Earl Warren College sophomore Kristopher Lederer created CampusBoox to help ease the financial burden students from various schools throughout Southern California.
“The relief comes in the form of vastly cheaper textbook sales,” Lederer said. “The rising tide of financial burden has prompted the UC system to analyze various means to lower the costs of textbooks, but unfortunately, a clear solution is not on the horizon. At www.campusboox.com, we have come up with an immediate and free solution to high textbook prices.”
The free, self-supporting and student-run service helps to facilitate an online inter-campus transfer of textbooks at fair market value. Students can place their textbooks and contact information on an online database viewed by tens of thousands of inter-college students, with no login or sign-up required. They have the freedom to set their own prices for the textbook, and can sell it for close to the price they paid for it the previous quarter. In addition, the student who purchases the textbook will most likely pay less than he or she would have spent at UCSD Bookstore or Groundwork Books.
So far, students have been taking advantage of the new Web site.
“We have already run a small trial of this service at UCSD, and it has been welcomed with great success,” Lederer said. “In three days of operation, our service helped connect nearly 1,000 students to meet their textbook needs. This feat was accomplished with very limited advertising and poor timing, coming well after the end of the term.”
Along with textbooks, the site also contains listings for other necessities such as roommates, clothing, furniture and automobiles.
A similar site, Books on Campus, is being sanctioned by the A.S. Council. It offers the same services but charges the buyer and seller a $2.50 fee per transaction. Of this $5 fee per book sold, Associated Students receives $2 to fund student programs and organizations. A.S. Commisioner of Enterprise Operations Jeremy Cogan supports this venture as a service that provides a reliable option for students to save money.
Visit the site at www.booksoncampus.com. The required registration is free and the fee is only paid when the book is sold.
Students from across the country can also buy and sell their textbooks through the Web sites www.pdxbooks.com, www.thecollegecafe.com, www.ecampus.com and www.cheapcollege.com. Students looking to buy both used and new books online will find www.bigwords.com is a great resource.
Traditional book merchants, such as www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com offer books at used and significantly discounted prices. At both websites, when $25 or more is spent on new books, the expense of shipping and handling is free.
Students can also do an easy search for textbooks using www.textbookland.com. They can type in the title, author or ISBN number of the book and receive a comparison of the book’s price on several popular online book vendors, including www.barnesandnoble.com, www.ecampus.com, www.half.com and www.textbookx.com. The prices listed will include shipping and will indicate if sales tax will be necessary.
The college books section on the Yahoo! Shopping site also allows students to do a search and comparison of book prices from different vendors, including www.amazon.com, www.alibris.com, www.buy.com and www.walmart.com. Each of the merchants is also rated for price, shipping options, delivery, ease of purchase and customer service.
The drawback of using online book merchants to purchase books are the shipping and handling costs and the wait of up to two weeks for the books to arrive. However, most of the titles needed by students will be available on these sites, while a very limited number of copies of those books, if any, will be found on the student classified sites. Either way, whichever Web site you use will most likely lead you to lower prices than what you can find on campus.
