College is back, and so is the bill...

[Derek]

I just dropped over $300 on books today for my next semeseter at college. I guess the point of this topic is to find out whether or not this amount is:

a) Ludicrous
b) Really ludicrous

It's nice to see that printed on some of my books is: "This book is not returnable if it has been used."

Great. Just great.

[Vlad976]

Are you buying your books online? university book stores have a habit of way over charging seeing as they basically have a captive market...

Oh, how many books made up this $300 cost?

[Corribus]

It is ludicrous, but typical. It's not unusual for some single graduate level texts to surpass that total.

[ThunderTitan]

See, now i feel guilty about buying only like 3-4 books in 3 years of college. Then again there's no much point in buying books when you can get them online from the college's site.

[Derek]

Are you buying your books online? university book stores have a habit of way over charging seeing as they basically have a captive market...

Oh, how many books made up this $300 cost?

It is 12 books that make up this price. However, 4 of them are under 60 pages and 4 of them are used(beat up badly.) Really now, next time I am going online to buy them.

Has anyone had any luck with ebay or any such site in getting their books? I doubt many of the graduate texts would be there in large amounts, but still...it's just so much money!

[DaemianLucifer]

Hmmm...When I convert all of my books into dollars,it comes somwhere arround 200.But I dont buy books except for a few that the proffesors give extra points for having

[Caradoc]

When I was in school, the University Coop bought and sold used textbooks. You could get them at about half price and sell them back for about a quarter of the price. If you planned ahead, you could even catch someone selling the ones you wanted to buy and get an even better deal.

I also discovered that many of the textbooks were also in the library. This worked well for lit classes and such.

The last dodge, and one that had other benefits as well, was to organize a study group and share. I liked to have 5-6 people in the group and get 2 copies of each book. A lot of times you could have someone do the reading first and mark the important passages for everyone else.

[Vlad976]

If you planned ahead, you could even catch someone selling the ones you wanted to buy and get an even better deal.

Along those lines, might I recommend trying http://www.chegg.com?

[Kalah]

My five books set me back about $355 (compendia included). Hoping to sell some of them off next year though, and also sell some of my old books for this year. There's always somebody out there who hasn't got hold of the required books because the book shop didn't order enough.

[asandir]

that sounds about right to me, as in a rip-off, but they all are

i always sold mine off, except for the few that i still can use

[DemonHunter]

an average year at the university will propably cost almost €5000 for me,
My portable computer will propably be €1300

So I think the whole price is ludicrous

[DaemianLucifer]

Its funny how the guys publishing those books think:"Hmmm...It seems not many people want to buy our books.I know,lets make them more expensive to cover the cost!".Somehow its exactly like some game companies are thinking

[ThunderTitan]

I belive it's more along the lines of "they have to buy our books 4 school, lets make them horribly overpriced".

[Cunning Death]

I belive it's more along the lines of "they have to buy our books 4 school, lets make them horribly overpriced".

the ol' cool laws of demand and supply... a simple and abusing: if you want to learn, you'll need the books, cos the notes taken at lectures are quite useless and they don't bring any income. But you can't buy them elsewhere... so they have a nice way to get more money (someone doing economics might want to correct me if I'm wrong) example: I've bought a thin book for nearly 13€, which is quite much compared to hungarian prices (it's a simple math book, has no colors or photos or any fancy thingo, and it's quiet low quality). Of course I couldn't have bought it anywhere else, because it's from the schools own publisher

by the way: lectures start next week here so I've got no idea about this year's books

[DaemianLucifer]

the ol' cool laws of demand and supply... a simple and abusing: if you want to learn, you'll need the books, cos the notes taken at lectures are quite useless and they don't bring any income. But you can't buy them elsewhere... so they have a nice way to get more money

But there are smart people that can learn from notes,and those that extract just the most usefull things from books and then give it to their fellow colleagues for free.But there are also smart proffesors(smart as in devious)that require you to bring their expensive book to the exam in ordwr to pass.So its just exploiting of what someone needs very much.

[ThunderTitan]

I've got to wait till the 1st of October for school to start. And i'll prob not buy any books.

[name]

My books cost $417, and 2 of them are workbooks so I have to buy them. Plus my english books, I cant read my assignments without them. I guess the only book I could of done without is my physics, but since I dont already know every possilbe thing about field theory, I think it was a wise choice in buying it.

[asandir]

I'm just thanking god that im done with all that, got better stuff to spend my money on

[Milla aka. the Slayer]

Like pools and plane tickets right?

[Angelspit]

I didn't mind buying books when we actually used them, but I remember that a few teachers asked us to buy books and we ended up going through a few pages only, the rest was optional reading (which nobody has the time or interest to do anyway).