Buying textbooks online

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Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:14:59 +0000

I usually go through the Amazon marketplace, but I’ve also used Alibris and recently I’ve been doing well with ValoreBooks. I’ll often just plug the author and title and edition number (for textbooks – I use ISBNs for books that are likely to have a wider audience, like Hemingway novels) into Google and see what comes up. Note that your bookstore is likely to have used copies on the shelf, too.
Some places will tell you how fast things will ship. With Amazon, you can go back and cause problems if they don’t ship within 2 days (and don’t tell you it will take longer), and I’ve never had anything take longer than 3 without notification. Where it’s coming from also matters – if I order something from my state it’s likely to spend less time in transit than if I order something from halfway across the country – but unless something is shipping from overseas, 2 weeks is a safe estimate for standard shipping. (I did once have something from Alibris take 4 months, by which point I had been refunded the cost of the book, but that was the Post Office’s fault.)
How many used copies can you find out there? The more there are, the harder it is going to be to unload yours on your own. And the better you keep yours, the easier it’s going to be. I would much rather have a clean or almost clean copy of a book than one with highlighting and pen marks in the margins, and I’m willing to pay more for a clean copy than for one that’s messed up. A friend of mine tells me that law students are exactly the opposite: it’s not hard to go through and highlight the important bits so you can trust whoever had the book before you, but it’s time-consuming. Therefore a book that’s already marked up means less work.
Each professor is going to place a book order each semester, so once you have registered, start checking the bookstore to see whether your section of the class has anything there yet. (Bookstores will sometimes wait until the last moment to release that information, because then people are more likely to buy from them.) How often the text is going to change will depend on a lot of things: some public schools have requirements that texts no more than x year old be used; some schools have standardized things to the point that every single section of a given class will be using the same book(s); and so on. So if you order before you know what book(s) your section is being assigned, you’re gambling.
In the absolute worst-case scenario, where you’ve waited to order the book and the bookstore didn’t provide the information until the last minute and the book hasn’t arrived and you need to use it right away, check out the bookstore’s return policy. You can often buy a copy, be extremely careful with it, and return it. (Ordinarily that strikes me as cheating, but bookstores withholding information about what books everybody needs so that people can’t shop around strikes me as cheating too.)