Buying textbooks requires time and effort. With so many choices the quest to search for alternatives seems even harder.
Students now have the opportunity to rent, buy ebooks, purchase them in the bookstore, buy through online retailers or get them from other students.
The benefits of each can be carefully analyzed but taking the time to do so often becomes a problem.
Some websites focus solely on making this search easier for students and have created search engines that are designed to simplify the process.
As mentioned in The New York Times, these search engines can even be modified to combine several retailers such as Amazon, eBay, Half, Chegg and the university’s bookstore in order to compare which one offers the best deal, including shipping and tax.
Some of these websites include BigWords.com, DealOz.com, Slugbooks.com, CateScribe.com, Getchabooks.com, ValoreBooks.com and Neebo.com, each designed to make the search process easier and more efficient.
Taking the time to compare several websites and their offers narrows the search but how much is a student willing to pay in return for waiting a certain amount of time to obtain the necessary textbooks?
“I got half of my books at the bookstore because it was faster, but they ended up being more expensive,” Freshman Isabel Rodriguez said. “I prefer purchasing my books online because it is less expensive, even if it takes longer to receive the books, it saves me money.”
While the bookstore tends to offer higher prices, this is not because they are trying to earn a higher profit but rather because there is a middle man in charge of buying textbooks from students and then selling them back to the university.
It is often the case that not all the textbooks sold to this company are kept at CBU but are bought to then resell to other universities.
For this reason, the demand for specific textbooks may be higher when compared to those that are rarely requested and it is important to sell them back as soon as possible.
“You can get up to 67 percent of your book back in the first couple of days, it all depends on the demand of the textbook,” Shipping and Receiving Director at the CBU Bookstore Morgan Pedersen said.
Take the time to choose wisely whether the choice is to purchase your books online, buy them from a friend and sell them back to the bookstore.
