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Textbooks

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Schmung:

--- Quote from: Se7en ---My brother got through his comp sci. without buying a single textbook, or turning up to any lectures. He bassically did nothing for almost 3 years, then worked almost 24/7 for a month on his dissertation.
--- End quote ---


That sounds familiar. Your brain does some weird shit after that amount of sleep deprivation though.

Newton:
I've had a few crappy books that I will never look at again (like my undergrad thermo and statistics books), but others I've been using for four or five years after I originally took the class.  They are really good references when you are in certain subjects, like physics, so I don't sell any of my books back anymore.  And I have that Kreyzig Advanced Engineering Mathematics book in the picture.  That one is full of good stuff.

JP:
Starlight - Thanks. But don't be put off by how much effort it might take, it's absolutely worth it - and it's really not that much effort. The book stores generally don't change their prices from semester to semester, so it's not like you need to check every time how much the book costs, just remember what you bought it for and sell it for a little less. Most of the effort comes from taping flyers to the doors, and well, if taking an hour to walk around campus can save/earn you two hundred bucks, seems like it's worth it.

I wish everybody resold their books like this because its really win-win. The seller wins because he gets way more than $20 for a book he originally shelled out $80 (or more) for, and the buyer wins because he's paying $50 or $60 instead of $80 for the same book. The only loser is the bookstore, who's ripping you a new one anyway.

The principle is simple: The bookstores might charge $70 for a used copy of an $80 book, and you can always charge less than the bookstores and get more than what they would give for a buy-back. Even for novels, let's say new costs $8, used $6, and buy-back price is between $1-$2. Why not sell your copy for $5 or $4? You still come out ahead of the alternative.

Sorry this post is getting so long, but if everybody re-sold unwanted books like this we'd all save a lot of money, and be able to re-sell the books we bought for almost the same price we bought them, and with all the saved money, maybe we could have all eaten something nicer than ramen noodles every night for four years.

lordjim:
There is the idea that your textbooks are the beginnings of your professional library.  I never sold back any of my CS/Math and now Library Science text books.  Now I have a pretty good CS/programming, math and LS library.

However that idea has been trashed by the textbook publishers.  New editions every 2 years with little change, free copies to the professors (I had one prof who refused them and bought her own), and worst of all books that fall apart.

Now another thing.  My frat back in college did something like the flyer thing.  We pooled our textbooks that we didn't want at the end of the semesters and traded/sold what others needed.  It didn't work too well b/c most of us wanted to keep our major textbooks but if you could get a few organizations in on that kind of deal it may work.

edwartica:
I was an English major, so a lot of times I would be able to get my books used - kind of easy to find a copy, any copy, of Moby Dick or Othello.
Of course what I hated were the damned course packets - seventy-five bucks for photcopied materials!!! GEEZ! Did anyone else have to do those?

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