This book racket is a huge problem, but there are a lot of alternatives to the traditional approach to buying textbooks and selling them back for not nearly what they are worth.

Digital textbooks

You’ve all heard of the Kindle right? It’s a very cool gadget that has digital copies of books on it for you to read. It even looks like a book. It’s about $300, so it’s use for regular books is at best. But, think about how much you spend in textbooks. If universities sold these to you, they could eliminate all the profits of the bookstore, all the shipping costs, and all the printing costs of the textbook. You could buy textbooks at half price using these.

Textbook sharing

Another great way to save money is to have a small group buy only one or two books and share it. My friends and I set up a system like this and it saved us a small fortune. We took classes in groups of two or three. Then, another group of us would schedule the same class next semester. Group 1 would take Accounting 101 in the first semester, and Group 2 would take Astronomy 101 in the first semester. Then we would switch, and exchange books. If there were two of us in a class, we bought one book and shared. We would end up buying two books for four of us, and use the same books next semester. Two books for eight students!

Requesting library books

Sometimes we would have four or five of us ask the professor before the class started to have the book available in the library. If the professor puts a copy of the book in the library, then you can check it out whenever you want to and not have to buy the book. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “yeah, but during finals the book won’t be available.” I would check the book out during non-peak times (nights during the week or early morning on weekends). This strategy forced me to do my homework ahead of time in the fear that someone would have the book checked out. I ended up being ahead of the curve when I did this.

Student buyback

Organizing a group of college students to sell each other books is one of the easiest organizing projects you’ll ever have. Most colleges already have this, so look them up. Instead of selling your book to the bookstore for $50 and having them sell it to your friend for $80, why not just sell your friend the book for $65 and cut out the middle man? Most dorms have a project like this, and it usually comes about right after (or during) finals. So make sure you check with the dorms. If they don’t have it, usually the dorms are friendly about letting you get out word about this. Post a flier in the lobby and tell a few RA’s about it. You’ll get a ton of people together to save money (and hopefully find a few buyers of your own!). The best way to do this is to organize by subject, or school (like the business school, or humanities).

You can come up with a lot of other ideas as well. These are just ways to get you started in thinking about textbooks differently. You can save thousands of dollars by applying these strategies. Using this with other strategies to saving money (like the article about energy efficiency in school) can make a huge difference.

Implementing these strategies will force creative solutions instead of a giant rip off.

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