How Do Students Really Feel About Textbooks?

By Madison White on June 14, 2016

The college textbook industry is thriving, but for many college students, it’s a curse. Navigating the cheapest, easiest, most usable, and most accessible textbooks often takes research, planning, and a great deal of care.

From using and renting to buying and selling, the textbook acquiring part of college leaves most of us students tired, annoyed, and significantly broker than we intended.

But is the process of buying textbooks all bad? Certainly not, but it usually isn’t pleasant. From personal experience, friends’ experiences, and other students’ experiences, the journey to find the perfect textbook has been navigated frequently.

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Back in the day, textbooks could be purchased at the university bookstore quickly, efficiently, and cheaply. Anymore, this is not the case. The bookstore offers the required texts, but ordering them means buying them, which means being charged full price. You can usually buy used textbooks from the bookstore but these will cost you roughly the same amount.

If you buy it now, you can just sell it back at the end of the year with no harm done, right? Sadly, this is not usually the case. Most textbooks will cost at least $50 minimum and usually range upwards of $100. My friend last semester bought one of these books for her class and they bought it back from her, in near perfect condition, for a whopping $6. That’s right, six. Many universities have also gotten into the habit of self-publishing books or buying the rights to certain books so that they cannot be purchased anywhere else besides the university. If this happens, you’ll unfortunately just have to chock up the cash.

However, as many students have realized the expensive and cunning ways of the university bookstores, they’ve also found ways around it.

A current undergraduate senior stated, “I find that I have to compare prices from multiple sources in order to truly save the most amount of money, no matter if a store (or company) advertises themselves as having the ‘best prices’ for students.”

This thought is frequent among many students. Many companies will “guarantee” the best prices on textbooks when there are other way more comparable companies out there. This means that if you believe the first site you look at is the cheapest, you’re likely not getting the best deal. From a quick Google search of ‘renting textbooks’ all of the first page options have the word ‘cheap’ either in the title or description. Competition is fierce, but it also means you’ll spend a lot of hours searching around for the best deal.

In many universities, the library houses a huge array of academic books. Yet, your options to simply rent, for free, from the library are usually limited, if not obsolete. The unfortunate thing about textbooks is the need for a specific year, title, and edition to navigate the class smoothly.

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As an English major, any literature course often requires about three to four different books. As most of these are classics and widely available, I could theoretically rent them from the library which has multiple copies. However, the class requires a certain edition that the library often doesn’t have which means settling for a different version would be settling for being extremely lost in class. Another great resource deemed not useful.

Yet despite the dismal outlooks for finding textbooks, there are good options. Renting provides a much cheaper option to buying textbooks. Many students have found success renting from Amazon and Chegg which will rent textbooks for a semester for about a third of the cost of buying them. This also means, however, no marking in your textbook unless you want to get charged. For some, this can be a challenge that just isn’t worth renting for. Annotations, highlights, and other things may prove more than useful in the studying of your course.

A former college alumnus weighed in here.

“As an alum who still owns the majority of her textbooks, sometimes I go back and read the fun ones. I’m glad I didn’t sell them. (Mostly because I’m a nerd who was so passionate about my major that I still enjoy reading things about it). Yeah, they were expensive, but they have MY annotations and MY thoughts in them. I like it.”

There are inevitably pros and cons to buying or renting textbooks.

Ultimately, there is still yet to be a perfect solution to the textbook problem. It plagues so many students who are already short on cash having paid their tuition bills. Because of this, many companies have capitalized on the renting market to attract the ones who need to save some cash. Unfortunately, this also means that finding the best deal between renters means lots of work as well. Therefore, there are a few ways to skirt the textbook problem, but you’re going to have to search for them.

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