This isn’t new, but I think it’s time to see who had to pay the most on textbooks this semester. I know it wasn’t me. I price shopped (and even bought the e-book of one of my textbooks) and managed to ONLY spend $300.
How about you folks?
It’s amazing to me just how expensive these things are. I mean seriously.
– IG
I’m taking two classes this coming semester. My International Management class text cost $119 - USED. I’m also taking Quantitative Methods for Managerial Desision Making I, and there won’t be any used texts available. Cost new will be $156.50.
It’s really a complete travesty that college bookstores do this. I’m in favor of capitalism and all that, but this streches the limits of decency.
Agreed. It’s not like your average college student has a lot of extra money to throw around.
My average per semester (new) has always been about $300 CND. However, most of my classes have been in humanities and the texts tend to be cheaper than, say, computer science. This year has been cheaper than that even, but not for good reasons. The one class I’ve bought books for so far this semester has been $65 (the average spent on most of my courses), my other two will probably be similar.
The most expensive book I ever had to buy was a Neural Science textbook, at $140. That was a really tough semester - I spent about $500 on texts and course reading material. My major was Physiology, so it was all biology and neuroscience and toxicology and anatomy… those books do not come cheap! And then instead of giving us handouts, the profs would have notes printed up for us and sold at the bookstore, which is a nice idea in theory, but some profs seemed to just fill those packs with extra pics and things that really didn’t need to be in there, because if they were going to have a course pack it should look like you’re getting lots of stuff for your money! The result: we’d pay $40 for the damn thing and only get use out of maybe 60% of it. And of course they rarely printed on both sides of the paper, so I feel responsible for the death of a whole bunch of rainforest.
It was the only semester I wasn’t able to get my hands on anything used, but I usually had luck with books4exchange and similar websites, or bulletin board ads on campus. I would have done Amazon’s used books options, but living in Canada, the shipping usually makes it complicated and expensive.
That is what I liked about UW-Platteville: Textbook rent was included in your tuition. You picked up your books at the beginning of the semester and returned them at the end. You could buy them if you wanted (I didn’t even know this till my Junior year), but no need to.
I even picked up a book for a class that I wasn’t taking (to see if I wanted to take the class next semester)
Brian
Oy, do I hear ya!
At least it’s gotten easier through half.com, and all my books from now on are business. This means I can buy the international edition for about 60% of the price, which is how much the book would have cost me after buyback anyway. Plus, I get to keep the book.
My own personal favorite was the Science study guide I got last year. Never used it, went to sell it back at the end of the semester, and got the old, “We’re not using this edition anymore.” But, it was BRAND FREAKIN NEW 4 months ago. At least the bookstore has a notice that says when a book is about to be discontinued/replaced.
Oh, and as an afterthought: 4 classes of books=$270. Cheapest semester ever!
I go to a UW school and we have textbook rental. It’s nice - no big book expenditure and students aren’t stuck trying to sell the texts back for pennies on the dollar at the the end of the semester. When I was bike commuting I rented 2 sets - one for home, one in my locker, so I didn’t have to lug them back and forth on my bike.
I’m just getting into looking at textbook prices for this semester - I know it’s going to be at least 4 books, average £40 each. Gulp. No food, drink or air for me for the next three months.
One of my favorite graffitti’s from my college days:
Looking to get fucked?
go to book buy-back
all about apostrophe relocation I learn’ed in college.
I’m only taking three actual classes this semester (everything else is independent studies and stuff) and one of them uses a book I already have, so it shouldn’t be too bad. I’ll find out this afternoon. I meant to ask my roommate (who’s already back) to look in the bookstore and give me the ISBN numbers of the books I need, but I forgot, and I wouldn’t be able to get them by Monday if I ordered them online today. Someday I’ll learn.
Last semester I paid $80 for my French textbook and then found it for $20 online. I ordered that and tried to keep from dropping the other one in mud or anything. When the cheap one came, it turned out to have some stupid girl’s scribblings on just about every page, and most of the answers written in. It didn’t take me long to realize that most of the answers were wrong, so I decided to deal with it and returned the $80 one.
Ugh, my classes are almost always expensive, because I can’t “cheat” by buying the books elsewhere. I’m a Spanish major. You can’t just go to amazon and find “El Aznarato” or “Breve historia de la guerra civil.” Or–in the case of this semester’s class, contemporary surrealist Mexican literature about vampires. I end up paying through the nose for imported crap, from this shit bookstore called Shaman Drum, which NEVER has the books we need in time, EVER.
So far this semester I spent $178 on my Stats class. I still don’t have my Spanish books (because they aren’t in, of course.) I don’t even want to know.
Actually, textbooks are a growing scandal.
Repeated editions with few new entries make high profits for the book sellers and eliminate trade in value.
I hate buying textbooks. It’s obscene.
Lasy year I took a Nutrition class. Huge, brand new textbook. $110. Came out in January, right before class started.
Get excited in May come buyback time because this book still looks brand new and it costed so much I figured I’d get some good money back.
They said they had a new edition in, and that my $110 brand new book was worth one dollar.
Wtf? Such bs! That was the semester my books were $500. Didn’t get jack back. “We’re not using this book anymore;” “We’re not offering this class next semester;” “There is a new edition.”
I went yesterday to get mine. Not all were in, spent $350 so far. Eight mofoing books for my Brit Lit class. Boo. My small but new Developmental Psych book was over $100.
In my University days, the campus bookstore would let you return a book for a full refund within the same day. This was to cover students who occasionally picked up the wrong book for a class.
I would by all of my books, head to the local copy centre and photocopy the entire damn thing for 2 cents per page. So a 500 page book costing me $140 would be copied for 10 bucks. Return the book, get my full refund. This worked GREAT until they started shipping books with software disks and of course, no refund once the shrink wrap has been opened :mad:
Lockers for College? How does that work?
Last semester I had 5 classes. I figured 100 bucks per text. Total came to 514.
4 of the books were used, the 5th was $142. The Stats text was 33 dollars, its a custom printed text, and has been used for years. I budgeted 500, so 14 over wasn’t too bad.
This semester, I neglected to budget the 500 bucks. I decided to rent this semester. (I didn’t last year cause I didnt want to deal with them again, after a near miss on owing the money for the book in full, AFTER already returning it!). I have 4 classes this year, and did 211 in actual physical text books. An second book for one class was an e-book and was $50. This saved 10 bucks from the actual physical book.
I budgeted out 400, and came in about 140 under. As I don’t have a job, My ramen just got upgraded to tuna.
I had a classmate who didnt get his books till halfway through the semester. He told me that he got B’s on his exams, simply because the Professor used the test bank that had questions verbatim from the quizesa and review methods from the Text’s free book website.
I just don’t buy the book until I need it. Saves time, saves money, makes me work harder to find the info elsewhere.
– Quote from a friend of mine, sick of spending 500 for books he never used
When I was studying architecture at Waterloo, we had these big metal boxes on wheels in the main studio. Every first-year student got one, and kept all their art supplies and other things in it. The studio was open 24/7 and over time it accumulated sleeping nooks and plants and stereos and furniture and a microwave oven and all kinds of crap.
Re: the OP… I’m looking at a few books for various building courses I’m taking, and the prices make me flinch. Especially since I’m funding this in my spare time, so to speak, not as a regular student. Every book I’ve seen is over a hundred dollars, some in the 160-dollar range. Then there’s the Building Code itself, which was closer to 300. And was superseded four months after I bought it, so I’m going to have to buy it again. The joys of legal transition.
I am so glad I kept my old books. I just with I hadn’t misplaced or permalent my copy of Basic Technical Mathematics with Calculus (SI Edition). That one’s going to be annoying to replace.
That’s why I never bother with the official “buyback” things - they always pull that sort of crap with “new editions” or “not using that book this semester”, and you get peanuts for your books, if anything. You’ve got a better chance making some of your money back by trying to sell the books to other poor students like yourself, who probably won’t mind if it’s one edition behind, especially if they can get it for half the cost of the new one.
Hate to dump on the OP here, but you’re getting socked some 20 or 40 or 100 thousand in tuition costs, plus four years of your freaking life, and you’re complaining about a few hundred dollars for books that have no chance of reching a wide audience? This, and complaints about the cafeteria food, puzzles me the most.
I agree about the scandal of textbook edition revision that seem primarily directed at evading book reseling, though. And the books are overpriced, but I’m trying to point out that there’s a good reason (specialized audience) for that, and that the overpriced books can be considered just another cost of your already costly education. As a professor, it does piss me off when I assign a text (typically a non-overpriced novel or books of poems) and my students say they haven’t read it because they can’t afford the 20 bucks–“Yeah? How about flunking out? Is that affordable?”