Buy college textbooks online and you will save up to 50% of what your college estimates you need to spend on books. These expenses are figured in to your cost of attendance (coa). And this cost of attendance is used to calculate your financial aid and loan needs. So when it comes to getting loans for school, you can start out ahead of the game by taking less, or if the loans are subsidized, you can put your savings in an interest-bearing account and pay down the principal when you graduate. Although saving a few hundred bucks may not seem like much when you are looking at thousands in loans, it will add up. You are going to need to buy books for 8-12 (if you are in a tri-semester school) semesters. Do the math-- and if this money is earning you interest, all the better.
Up until last year, it was not always practical to buy college textbooks online. Book lists for courses were not published well in advance and students who waited, ran the risk of not being able to find their books in time. Finding booksellers that carried required texts was difficult and using little-known and perhaps unreliable sellers entailed even more risk.
All this has changed thanks to a little-publicized provision in the 2008 Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. It requires:
1. textbook publishers to provide pricing information to professors
2. schools to provide book lists to students early
This has helped to improve the online textbook retail industry enormously. Now, if you buy college textbooks online, you know that not only do professors and students have this information, but so do the online retailers. They can stock the books that will be needed (and dump the ones that won't be) and streamline their businesses to provide increased benefits to their customers (like fast or free shipping). You don't have to stick with Amazon anymore, either. Secure payouts, sophisticated search functions and 24/7 customer support is the rule among online textbook retailers.
The irony is that the colleges who figure out your cost of attendance are stuck with the book estimates they get by using prices on books from their college bookstores. They can't do these estimates using the online discount textbooks, so their figures will always be higher than they need to be.
The risks are mostly gone now; all you have to do to save a bundle on your college texts is to find out what books you need for your next semester's courses. No more waiting in line at the college bookstore the day before classes start. No more fighting over the last used, discounted textbook for a course. (Online retailers have plenty of these as most also have a book buyback program.) And best of all, you can get a jump on your next semester's reading assignments, because you will have all your books early if you buy college textbooks online.
Up until last year, it was not always practical to buy college textbooks online. Book lists for courses were not published well in advance and students who waited, ran the risk of not being able to find their books in time. Finding booksellers that carried required texts was difficult and using little-known and perhaps unreliable sellers entailed even more risk.
All this has changed thanks to a little-publicized provision in the 2008 Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. It requires:
1. textbook publishers to provide pricing information to professors
2. schools to provide book lists to students early
This has helped to improve the online textbook retail industry enormously. Now, if you buy college textbooks online, you know that not only do professors and students have this information, but so do the online retailers. They can stock the books that will be needed (and dump the ones that won't be) and streamline their businesses to provide increased benefits to their customers (like fast or free shipping). You don't have to stick with Amazon anymore, either. Secure payouts, sophisticated search functions and 24/7 customer support is the rule among online textbook retailers.
The irony is that the colleges who figure out your cost of attendance are stuck with the book estimates they get by using prices on books from their college bookstores. They can't do these estimates using the online discount textbooks, so their figures will always be higher than they need to be.
The risks are mostly gone now; all you have to do to save a bundle on your college texts is to find out what books you need for your next semester's courses. No more waiting in line at the college bookstore the day before classes start. No more fighting over the last used, discounted textbook for a course. (Online retailers have plenty of these as most also have a book buyback program.) And best of all, you can get a jump on your next semester's reading assignments, because you will have all your books early if you buy college textbooks online.
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