Best Sites to Find College Text Books

Paying for college can be a nightmare. Overinflated prices, dormitory rentals or apartments off campus, a drop in the amount of work for students… that is the reality of university that we are often confronted with when the time comes to apply. What a bleak image it is, too.

While there are scholarships and grants to help pay for the tuition, there isn’t always enough left over for one of the most important items on the list: textbooks. Extremely expensive, books can costs hundreds of dollars a piece. In rare instances, those figures can actually move into the thousands. It is a lot to pay for something you will use for a semester or two and then never open again.

But, as we all know, they are completely necessary. So how can you cut the cost of these books without getting something that is falling apart and covered in unspecified stains? Just check out these five excellent suggestions for getting textbooks for less.

Amazon

This is the obvious first place to look. They have an entire section dedicated to buying new and used textbooks, as well as Kindle editions that are good alternatives for more high priced hardbacks. Used books can cut the price down significantly, sometimes as much as 75% or more. If you are a Prime member, you can also get free shipping, and of course they have the super saver on items of more than $25.

Buy.com

While they aren’t always the best, Buy.com has some decent discounts on textbooks, usually in the $10 – $30 off range. Their shipping prices are good, and they have plenty of more hard-to-find titles. Plus, there is a point system that can save you additional money if you have a large order to place, or you are a frequent shopper.

Half.com

A sister site of eBay, Half.com has incredible prices on many textbooks. They have deals that put the prices down as low as 95% off, with very cheap (or free) shipping. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all of their prices will be this low. It is usually part of a promotion or clearance. But even their other deals are much better than you might expect.

CheapBooks

If you want to compare before you shop – which is always a good idea – you should check out CheapBooks. They gather a list of the lowest prices from various sellers like the ones above, and give you a rundown. They also buy back textbooks for resell, so you can go through them next semester and just trade in for credits to use on the next class’s textbooks.

Chegg

If you don’t want to buy, you can always rent. Chegg has a system that lets you rent your textbooks, and you can get them fast with their quick shipping policy. You can also buy and sell reading and class notes, get homework help and find special deals just for students.

Conclusion

It is completely possible to get textbooks for cheap, and occasionally for a small fee. All you have to do is know where to look. So check out the sites above, and start saving money. You will need that cash for Top Ramen later.

Kate S. is a college student who blogs online about educational resources.

View Comments

Best Smartphone Data Plan for College Students

Being a Droid user I hate to admit it, but the king of smartphones is undoubtedly the Iphone. A week after its release the Iphone 4s was in the hands of 4 million people. However, with Apple’s newest Iphone comes the addition of yet another cell phone provider, Sprint, leaving us to wonder: Which cell phone provider is best for you, the college student? I’ll answer our question with another, what do we use our smartphone for?

Smartphone Services

Do you use it for…

Texting? Today I send far more texts then I make phone calls. But it’s not just me. I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop yesterday and overheard one friend explaining her breakup story to another. The girls entire breakup happened via text message – I know this because she read and analyzed the entire text exchange, between her and Ex-beau, with her friend. When relationships are ending via text, you know it’s a popular, if not essential, form of communication. Consider this when you’re picking a service plan.

Browsing? I’ve signed up for just as many classes on my smartphone as I have on my computer. After all, with impacted classes you need to be on your game. I may not always have my computer, but I always have my smartphone. In fact, the NY Times last year released an article discussing Americans use of data over calls. Every time you open your browser, change you’re status on Facebook, use Google Maps, check you’re emails, watch a Youtube video, or listen to Pandora, you are using data, and a lot of it. If you get a smartphone, you’ll need a dataplan.

What you don’t use it for…

Phone Calls, if the last two bullet points didn’t tip you off, then I’ll be more clear: talk time is dropping. Think about how many texts you send a day as compared to phone calls you make. Personally I send around 15-40 texts a day as apposed to 2-7 phone calls. The moral of this story is you don’t need that many minutes.

Analysis of Cell Plans

The side-by-side below indicates my top cell phone plan picks from each of the providers, based on your needs as college student. All the hidden fees and additional benefits are listed below. However, if you’re not bound to a particular provider then I recommend Sprint as the biggest bang for your buck. Though AT&T’s ($40 per month) and Verizon’s ($45 per month) baselines fees are below Sprints ($70 per month), those providers don’t include unlimited text and data like Sprint does. If you want unlimited text and data, (which you do), AT&T costs an additional $50 per month while Verizon costs an additional $65 per month. For a college student with limited funds, Sprint is the way to go.

This guest post is by Kyle Espinola, a senior at UCSB and Intern at FindTheBest. The site helps you find the best of anything from ski resorts to credit cards.

View Comments

Ten Amazing Open Courseware Resources

One of the enduring beauties of the internet is the anarchist philosophy that shaped it in the early days. For many years and to a lesser degree still today, you can find things free on the internet that would cost you money in a more traditional marketplace. This open access concept has been picked up by a number of universities and other storehouses of knowledge, resulting in many websites that provide some remarkably extensive resources. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology puts the course material for every course taught at the university online. Other schools have followed suit to varying degrees.

The course material from MIT or any other top tier university is not necessarily going to be easily learned once you open a file. For many of these courses you need certain academic background or the material won’t make much sense. You don’t get to ask questions of a lecture delivered in a MP3 file. You won’t receive credit for going through this course material, but you don’t have to enroll either. For students who are stalled in their own course material and who need another perspective, the websites listed below might be a welcome – and free – resource. To find these sites, go to the home page for each university and search for “open courseware.”

  1. The Open Courseware Consortium is an organization that has catalogued open courseware courses from sources around the globe. They also have a comprehensive list of open courseware websites offered by universities on every continent.

  2. Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health provides content from the school’s most popular courses. There are twenty topic areas, each of which has material for multiple classes. There are courses on fairly focused topics, but there are also introductory courses in such fields as demographics, epidemiology, and biostatistics.

  3. University of Notre Dame offers courses from a wide variety of departments and academic disciplines. There are selected courses in history, political science, sociology, physics, mathematics, civil engineering, and several others.

  4. UC Berkeley has integrated 170 courses taken from many different departments into a webcast format. Most have some video or graphics support for the lectures; the format of choice is Apples ubiquitous iPod software. You can watch any of the lectures if you have the software on your computer by downloading from Berkeley’s iTunesU.

  5. MIT was the impetus for many of the open courseware projects instituted by other universities. Material from 2,000 courses is available on their website. The courses include the physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering programs that the school is known for as well as courses from the humanities, health sciences, and many other areas. Depending on the course you may find lecture notes, multimedia content, online textbooks, exams and solutions, or some combination of these elements.

  6. Carnegie Mellon has designed their open courseware project around a limited number of departments including biology, chemistry, French, statistics, and physics. There is also a course in media programming.

  7. University of Michigan has launched its open courseware project with selected classes from eleven academic areas including architecture and urban planning; literature, science and the arts; education; engineering; public policy; social work; and five others. There are not a large number of courses posted yet but more are added on a frequent basis.

  8. Stanford has created Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) which offers extensive material for a limited number of classes from the engineering department. Materials include complete video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts. The available material includes an Introduction to Computer Science.

  9. UC Irvine has developed an open courseware program that offers lectures and materials from a variety of courses. Participating departments include Social Science, Engineering, Humanities, Health Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Arts. Some of the lectures are available in video.

  10. Yale has a program called Open Yale Courses with an array of courses from twenty academic departments. Some departments have just a single course in audio/video format, while others offer several. Choices range from music to engineering to Spanish and Portuguese.

About the author: Bob Hartzell has been writing about education for five years on a variety of websites. Most of his recent blog submissions have been about online graduate programs and their value in career enhancement, in recognition of the fact that the job market has gone completely haywire in the last decade. For those short on time or with limited standardized testing consider a NO GMAT Mba program.

View Comments

Write to Impress: Impressing Your Professor

One of the best things anybody can do in any class where essays are involved is to really get to know the professor. A good understanding of what your professor expects in your writing will serve as a compass, leading you through the time consuming writing process steadily and unwaveringly. But how do you acquire this understanding? It is very important that you take advantage of your professor’s office hours. If there are no office hours, then try to meet with him or her after class.

Almost universally, your professor will do what he or she can to help you with your writing, offering valuable suggestions for tweaks and edits. Pay close attention to your professor’s suggestions, as these are indicative of their overall preferences for written work. Professors love it when students show an interest in their class beyond merely showing up and doing the work. When you show up for office hours it makes them think “hey, this kid really works hard, and really wants a good grade”. So beyond being a great way to actually get much needed help, talking to your professor outside of class is likely to affect your grade in a positive way just through psychology.

It is such an effective strategy, in fact, that many students who don’t really need help on their essays “play the game” and show up anyway. We’ll let you decide whether they’re shameless brown-nosers or just savvy grade-hounds. All we know is that they get better grades than those who are “too cool for school.” Your professors are generally the altruistic, liberal type, and it gives them warm fuzzies when they think they’re guiding and helping students. So take advantage of them by any and all means!

Finding a Voice

This falls under the category of “style”, but its magnitude of importance warrants a category unto itself. It doesn’t require much description, however, because it is pretty much self-explanatory. You want to have a distinct voice in your writing. No matter what the topic is, you are telling a story. Write it like you speak it. Be sure that your word choice reflects your own semantic preferences. Make it entertaining to the reader. A writer’s work can sound humorous, serious, or lugubrious without the content being explicitly any one of those things. Do not forget to convey your voice in a way that is readable and grammatically correct. And, while accurately rendered idioms and colloquial witticisms will give your paper that much-sought-after feeling of authentic rusticity, please use them sparingly. Save your comprehensive mastery of dialects and folk-speech for poems, short stories, and novels.

This guest post was written by Maggie Warren. If you’re ready to impress your professor and get more tips on how to write an essay without feeling stuck or confused, visit her website to download her ebook.

2 Comments

Friends of CB: Sexy Fly By

For the next five days, Hipmunk has a contest where they are giving away free plan tickets to bring you home for Thanksgiving. As of right now there are only 59 entries so chances are high to win! Enter the contest

Adobe just announced the winners to their Imagination Challenge. Check out the awesome works that won $10,000

MTV True Life is looking for people to interview for two different episodes: “I’m Breaking Up with my Best Friend” and “I’m Addicted to Marijuana”. If you have any experience with either case and want to be interviewed, contact them at tlbestfriend@gmail.com or TLmarijuana@gmail.com, respectively.

The Institute of HeartMath has a bunch of free tips and a $13 complete De-Stress Handbook available on their website. Find out facts like how the human body doesn’t discriminate between a big stressful event and a little one and help yourself do better in school. Get a bunch of free tips

Blades Magazine reports that a young couple jumped out a an airplane naked and proceeded to have intercourse while skydiving. See the video (NSFW)

1 Comment

Next Entries »
« Previous Entries