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:
These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com
