Reading Copy Book Blog

The Harvard Crimson student newspapers reports how the Harvard coop bookstore asked a student to leave when staff saw that he was making notes of textbook prices so he could go away and conduct an online price comparison (which obviously would have generated a set of prices much, much cheaper).

Shame on the Atlanta Journal Constitution… shame on you. First, you shut down your book section and now you give free rein to this deluded professor who attempts to explain why textbooks should be very, very expensive.

I’m sure the professor, Kenneth S Saladin, will be thrilled to know that used copies of his textbook, Anatomy and Physiology: The Unity of Form and Function, start at $2.16 on AbeBooks.com.

The list price for the current fourth edition of his book is $155.94.

A professor at Fresno State has raised $1200 for a textbook lending program by signing up to the annual “Sharkfest”, a swim race from Alcatraz to the San Francisco shoreline. The book fund will rent students the textbooks they need for $1 a week.

If you are one of thousands of US students heading back to university, then here are a few tips for buying textbooks on the Internet. AbeBooks.com has been a player in the online textbook market for more than three years now so here’s some very simple advice for saving money on books.

1. Buy early – plan ahead and avoid buying just before classes begin because prices rise when supplies begin to decrease. Textbooks sell fast and furiously over a short period of time, so the best prices can be found early when the numbers of books online is far greater.
2. Buy used – secondhand textbooks offer large savings and it is not hard to find significant savings of $50 or more on list prices. It’s possible to find books at less than $10, sometimes even $1, if you are prepared to use a book that is several years old.
3. Consider older editions as they offer massive savings on list prices – if there have been no major updates to your subject (eg biology, chemistry) then an older edition will be fine. Contact course tutors and simply ask if an older edition will suffice – some courses change very little over the years.
4. Use the ISBN for rapid searching. Every book published since 1970 has an ‘International Standard Book Number’ (it used to be a 10-digit unique number but is now 13-digit) and searches by ISBN locate the exact book and disregard titles with similar names.

(Many courses do not issue reading lists with ISBNs – however, AbeBooks.com has a tool in its ‘Textbook’ section that allows students to search for textbooks by university and course.)

5. Look for the growing number of independent booksellers offering free shipping.
6. Don’t write on textbooks. Help keep its value for resale. (It’s also possible to sell textbooks at AbeBooks.com through its competitive buy-back program that includes free shipping.)

In around 10 days classes will start at least 50 major US universities and the traditional scramble for textbooks has already begun. At this time of year, we see a daily increase in sales as students go online looking for cheap textbooks.

Textbooks have been a big part of our business for around four years now and there are probably around two million listings dedicated to textbooks on the site right now. A week or so ago, we were thrilled by Gerri Willis, the personal finance editor on CNN, recommended AbeBooks.com as the best source for cheap textbooks in America live on CNN’s morning show.

Sorry that we’re late with blogging today. The US college textbook season is almost upon us and we’re preparing for our busiest time of the year. One of our tech folks informed me a few months ago that at the very peak of the Fall back-to-school season (last week of August), AbeBooks.com experiences 90 book searches per second.

Yesterday, we were recommended for offering cheap textbooks by Gerri Willis, CNN’s personal finance guru, and we always see a flurry of articles about the high price of US college textbooks in August.

I went to college in the UK more years ago than I can remember but was astounded by the list prices of textbooks when I came over here.

As the second semester of school starts up for students (as indicated by the full transit buses and the spike in sales for textbooks on AbeBooks), I found an article about the passing of Tom Suzuki - a designer who changed the way textbooks are created and designed.

“…he introduced a storyboard approach adapted from magazine-production techniques. With each book’s content precisely plotted, it was possible to commission photography and illustrations while the authors were still writing. He developed novel ideas for images, like designing three-dimensional models and having professional stylists stage editorial photography.”