By Jason Cunningham
The outrageous price of textbooks is nothing new to most CCSU students. The collective pain that surfaces when students have to dole out cash for the pricey pages that their professors assign puts a damper on the beginning of classes each semester. Buying and selling your textbooks at the campus bookstore is a painful cycle to get sucked into.
There are a great deal of students who live off of tighter-than-desired incomes and still pay more than $600 for books. It is also common to purchase said unbelievably expensive textbooks and only use them a handful of times throughout the year or semester. Fortunately, options to help students save money on textbooks are becoming more accessible each semester. Although it may seem less convenient, students should try to avoid the campus bookstore prices as much as they can.
One alternative is to take advantage of textbook rental programs. Web sites like the increasingly popular Chegg.com rent out new textbooks at reduced prices and then resell the used books upon return. Chegg offers an environmental incentive by planting a tree for each book rented. Other popular textbook rental sites advertise different charitable contributions for students to consider. CollegeBookRenter.com displays the biannual donation they build to give to the American Heart Association directly on their main page. Both Chegg and BookRenter.com have been raising funds for relief efforts in Haiti. These sites can be a great way to save money, however there are extension fees for books returned late, damage fees for any books that come back in an undesirable condition and replacement costs for lost or stolen books. Not every book is available for rental and some sites do not permit heavy highlighting, underlining or margin notes.
For those who want to mark up their course materials, sites like ValoreBooks.com offer extremely cheap used textbooks. Marketplaces like Amazon.com have loads of great deals for those willing to look. Dozens of easy to find sites sell new and used textbooks for less than what the campus bookstore charges. Students who are not particularly fond of purchasing or renting textbooks online can simply go to Another Bookstore, which guarantees prices cheaper than the campus bookstore and usually offers competitive prices for used books students plan on selling back.
If you’ve already wasted a good chunk of cash in the CCSU bookstore, you should reconsider your options. If you return your textbooks now, you can find better prices elsewhere before it gets too late in the semester. For those who haven’t purchased textbooks yet, don’t waste your time spending more than you need to. It’s far easier to save money from your computer or across the street at Another Bookstore than to purchase your textbooks on campus.