Here's a tip for the broke college kid: buy your textbooks online. I'm not talking about the regular old way; I'm talking one chapter at a time delivered in .pdf format.
Why would you want a chapter at a time? You get your syllabus at the beginning of the semester, which tells you the required chapters for the semester. Just think about it - how often do you actually go through an entire textbook?
I thought about buying the books, scanning the chapters I needed, then returning the books, but there's no way I would have manually scanned hundreds of pages. Ebooks also came to mind, as they should be cheaper than a hard copy, so I went to looking.
Eventually I came across iChapters.com. The thing I liked best is that they offer lots of books and you can purchase individual chapters! My Math 190 textbook ran me $110 used at my local bookstore, and we were only using 8 chapters. I looked on iChapters and compared the price of the individual chapters at $7.99 each- a total of $63.92 for the 8 chapters I needed. Purchasing only the chapters I needed saved me about 41% off the price of a used book at the local bookstore.
The chapters aren't some washed out, scanned POS .pdf's, they are actually high quality OCR scans, which means you can Ctrl+F and search the documents. That's a godsend during homework and studying, much better than flipping aimlessly through pages. iChapters also offer a free download of the first chapter of a book as a preview.
However, there's one thing that I hate - the security of the .pdf. If you want to access your material, you must login through the website and install (or authenticate through) their anti-piracy software. You cannot open the .pdf's unless you have an internet connection, nor can you view the chapters and print them to a .pdf or .ps file. I wish I could view the .pdf's offline without having to install any software, but that's just what they have to do to protect their content.
If you want to save LOTS of money, then buying only the chapters you need will definitely do so. You might not find all your books on iChapters, but it's definitely worth it even if you can find just one. The more money for pizza and beer, the better :)
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