5 Ways to Acquire Textbooks

 I was spoiled rotten in that I received many generous scholarships while I was in college--if it weren't for the scholarships I received, I may not have even gone to college, and I most definitely would not have attended the private college that I did graduate from.

 I hated. Hated. The cap and gown I had to wear for graduation. I tried to talk the students I was sitting with into boycotting the cultural norm and not wearing the silly square hats that would crush our hair, but they were all pretty sure that we would get in trouble if we tried being different during the graduation ceremony.

One thing all college students have to deal with is paying for textbooks. This annoyed some of my classmates more than it annoyed me,  because I actually read the textbooks and didn't consider them a waste of time. I did, however, consider them expensive. So I thought I'd talk about a few different ways one can handle the problem of textbooks in college:

1. Don't buy the required textbooks, and either sponge notes off of your classmates or simply guess when it comes to tests and assignments. This may earn you a passing grade in a certain easy courses, but I don't really recommend this strategy.

2. Find the textbooks in your college's library, and in order to prevent other people from checking them out during the semester,hide them behind bookshelves so that no one else but you can find them, and do all of your studying within the library doors (believe it or not, this is how Angel graduated from college while buying as few textbooks as possible. I still don't think that this is a highly ethical plan.)

3. Buy textbooks from your on-campus bookstore. This is what I did during my four years. Campus bookstores can often be more expensive, but if I bought books through the school, I could apply my scholarship money toward them instead of having to pay out of pocket, so it worked for me.

4. Buy textbooks online. Online, you can usually find books that are much cheaper than the books in the campus bookstore, but you have to be careful. I've heard all too many horror stories of purchasing the wrong textbook edition, or purchasing a textbook that takes so long to ship that the first test of the class is over before the book even arrives. Make sure you do your research well and plan ahead if you choose this strategy.

5. Rent your textbooks. In reality, you aren't ever going to need any of the books that aren't directly related to your major again after you're out of school. I kept my Chinese books, and Angel kept his nursing books, but we don't have any other books from the myriads of other courses we took. My college instituted an on-campus renting program through the bookstore during my senior year there, and I was able to take advantage of that. Today, anyone can rent textbooks from Campus Book Rentals--the prices are much cheaper than buying new books, plus you get free shipping both ways!

 

After doing some searching around their site, it was obvious to me that Campus Book Rentals offers quite a wide selection of textbooks. They even offer one of the Chinese textbooks I used as well as a book that two of my professors wrote while I was still in school--I did not expect to see that there! If you're in college, and the other options for acquiring the textbooks you need just aren't working for you, try renting for a semester! You just might like it. If you already own textbooks that you're not using, their RentBack program might be a great way for you to earn extra money off of those books by renting your old textbooks to other students.

Did you rent textbooks while you were in college? Did you keep any or all of your college textbooks, and if so, have you ever used them in post-grad life?

*This is a sponsored post on behalf of CampusBookRentals.com. All opinions are mine.