How to Save Money on Books

Drill it into your head that your campus bookstore is overpriced. But using a combination of these methods, I’ve saved hundreds of dollars on books. (My personal record for biggest savings was a $180 pair of textbooks at the bookstore for $18 total online—that’s including shipping!)
Condensed instructions for the most popular method: buying books online

Step 1. Get the ISBN for the book you need. It’s on the back cover.

Step 2. Search for the best prices on http://dealoz.com and http://bigwords.com/. They look through all the dozens of online merchants and compare prices for you, but they don’t always list the same places, so you’ll have to use both search engines.

Step 3. Use http://www.retailmenot.com/ to search for coupon codes before settling on what appears to be the cheapest option. You would enter amazon.com, abebooks.com, or whatever.
These are the same steps but with important but often neglected details spelled out:

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College 101: Where are the best places to buy cheap textbooks?

College 101: Where are the best places to buy cheap textbooks?

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Open-Source Textbooks a Mixed Bag in California

As California moves forward with the first open-source digital textbook program in the nation this fall, the best content seems a lot less like Wikipedia and a lot more like traditional publishing.

Bulky, hefty and downright expensive, conventional school textbooks may rank as the most outdated part of our nation's public education system. Many observers, including Chris Anderson, author of Free, have speculated that crowd sourcing could help bring down the cost of textbooks and improve their quality--but chipping away at the publishing industry's last profit center has proven more challenging in practice. In 2002, the California Open-Source Textbook Project aimed to produce a history textbook via Wikibooks that it estimated could save California $200 million per year. To date, the project has never cobbled together a complete book.
Read the full story at ScientificAmerican

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Calif. names digital textbooks that meet standards

State education officials on Tuesday named the first 10 digital textbooks that meet California academic standards for high school math and science.

The electronic textbooks, available for use as soon as this fall, were among the first reviewed as part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Free Digital Textbook Initiative.

The "open source" material was reviewed by a state education panel to help school districts identify online learning resources. Electronic textbooks for other subjects will be reviewed in coming months.

Of the 16 digital textbooks reviewed, 10 met at least 90 percent of California's high school math and science standards, according to the governor's office. Three of the four that met 100 percent of the standards were published by the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation in Palo Alto.

The governor is promoting free digital textbooks to help cash-strapped districts save money and create interactive learning environments in California, where the government has been forced to make drastic cuts to education funding.

But some experts say many California schools don't have enough computers or teachers trained in online learning to fully take advantage of digital textbooks.

State officials counter that even classrooms without computers for every student can still use electronic textbooks, which can be downloaded, viewed on a computer monitor, projected on a screen or printed out.

Bill Habermehl, Orange County's superintendent of schools, said the governor's initiative will help accelerate the shift toward online learning by validating the academic content in digital textbooks.

"Our problem is going to be funding," Habermehl said. "We have countries we look at as Third World using digital textbooks more than California."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/08/11/state/n111611D86.DTL&type=newsbayarea#ixzz0O2i4bOSG

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Digital Textbooks and “Fair Pricing”

Digital Textbooks and “Fair Pricing”

Those who know me personally know I have a strong desire to see digital textbooks succeed. I think it has the potential to deliver a Win-Win for most of the major stakeholders, including the authors, the publishers, the environment (potentially) and the students.¹ Perhaps the biggest challenge facing everyone in this is how to achieve that “win-win”and this involves a mix of pricing, availability, and convenience. I hope to address that in this post.

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Rent, Read and Return

Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.

Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry's bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.

With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they're out of a library -- only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don't return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse. As a disclaimer on Chegg warns: "Highlighting in the textbook is OK -- to a certain extent. Writing in the book is not accepted."

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