Don’t Buy From the Bookstore
Everyone here has dealt with the pain of buying books at the beginning of the semester for classes. Follett, the LSC bookstore is convenient and easy, but the price of their books is not worth this convenience. You can save a significant amount of money for just a little bit of extra work when it comes to buying your books. For example, every one of you in this class has, or should have, bought the Strategic Writing book that Professor Williams required. If you went straight to the bookstore, you paid either 87 dollars for the new book, or 65 dollars for a used book. If you had instead gone to amazon.com you could have purchased the book new for 72 dollars or used for 49 dollars. This is roughly a fifteen dollar savings in each case. You also could have gone to books.com and purchased a new book from Barnes and Nobles for 76 dollars or a used book for 42 dollars. In this case, you would spend 10 dollars less for the new book, and 23 dollars less for the used book than you would have spent at the bookstore.
It is nearly as easy to order books on a different website as from the bookstore. Many students place their orders online to the bookstore for pick-up in store. To buy the books from Amazon or Barnes and Nobles, all students need to do is go to the bookstore website and find what professors have required for texts for each class. Then, go to a website that sells new and used books, such as amazon.com or books.com and search the title of the books that are listed on the bookstore website. You can compare the prices that are found on these alternate websites, to the prices that you see on the bookstore website, and make sure you are getting the best deal. The order will be shipped to your house, and you can feel better because you were smart and didn’t let Follett rip you off.
Another benefit to buying books from an alternate source is that you can also sell your books back through them. If you don’t want to keep your books after the semester is over, this is good option to have. While the bookstore does sometimes take books back at the end of the semester, it gives low rates for sell-backs. On Amazon you can often get nearly all the money you spent back. All you need to do is create a seller account and post the book for the price you think you can get. Once you get a buyer you just send the book to the address that is given, and Amazon will deposit money into your bank account. By looking for alternate sources to buy textbooks, all students can save money and we can stop supporting a business that doesn’t always seem to support us.
