As many of you or your grown children head off to college you might have been as shocked as I was to see the "sticker price" on textbooks these days! This morning I read that textbooks make up a full 25% of the cost for a students' college expenses. Considering the way tuition costs have increased recently that is a pretty shocking to contemplate.
Luckily there IS something you can do to help control the cost. The first order of business would be to, as with everything else, shop around. In my experience you can purchase textbooks both new and used from Amazon.com for the same cost or even LESS than the prices in your local college bookstore (and in many states you won't pay sales tax so that makes up for the small shipping cost added) . Furthermore in many cases Amazon will offer you a guaranteed buy back at the end of the semester which greatly exceeds the buy back prices offered by most university bookstores. Amazon.com also allows the option to sell used textbooks which the student has purchased elsewhere. By making judicious purchase at Amazon whenever it was most advantageous and selling on there as well, my older student was able to graduate with less than a net cost (price paid minus selling price) of $800 for books for his bachelor's degree. His sister is well on her way to that goal as well!
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