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Get Cheap College Textbooks Online with CourseSmart.com
Having spent 7 years in college and law school, I can testify to the fact that there are three major problems with college textbooks: (1) they require the harvesting of a lot of trees to produce, (2) they are a pain to cart around, and (3), they cost a fortune. At least one company, CourseSmart.com, is trying to address all three of these drawbacks by offering cheap college textbooks online in the form of ebooks. Well, "cheap" may be a bit of an exaggeration, but half-price for textbooks that can in hardcover run $1,000 or more per school year is worth checking out.
I first heard of CourseSmart through the good folks at the Dollar Stretcher. CourseSmart allows students to buy textbooks in the form of ebooks. The ebooks can either be viewed online through CourseSmart, or students can download the ebook and view it through free software provided by CourseSmart.
CourseSmart currently offers more than 7,000 textbooks in over 900 courses. And the online viewer offers some great functionality. Students can highlight the text online, take notes online, and of course search the full text of the ebook. In addition, the page numbering of the ebook is the same as the hard copy version, so there is no confusion when a professor references a specific page. And pages can be printed if necessary.
Naturally the big question is exactly how much will CourseSmart save a student on textbooks. So to compare prices with Amazon, I picked an Algebra textbook called College Algebra with Applications for Business and Life Sciences, Enhanced Edition. Amazon offers the book new for $156.95 and used for $119.00. The CourseSmart price for the ebook version is $78.49. And if you're curious what the etextbooks look like online, you can preview the textbooks at CourseSmart.
Finally, here's a video CourseSmart put together to describe how textbooks can be viewed online.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Can you sell the etextbooks back after your done using them? If not this might not be such a great deal after all. I was generally able to keep my textbook costs pretty low by buying and selling at different stores/websites at different times.
Matt, you raise a valid point. Because they are ebooks, I don’t believe they can be sold back, and this should be factored into the textbook buying decision. When I was in college (President Reagan was in office), there were always one or two books that I couldn’t sell back because they were no longer being used. Others I could sell back for about 40%-50% of the original price. Either way, it’s a factor worth considering. Thanks for pointing it out.
I wish I had this option in college. Textbooks are so expensive, could have helped out a lot.
You can also try using http://www.bigwords.com They are a textbook search engine that searches all the online retailers to find you the best price. You can even specify when you want to search for new, used or both!
I save money by buying my textbooks online, maybe one day I’ll do ebooks but for now I prefer to actually have my textbooks, use http://www.cheapesttextbooks.com they are really good.
I like that eBooks are cheaper and eco-friendly, but they aren’t useful for some subjects or classes. I use http://www.campusbooks.com because they have eBooks, used books, and rentals all on one site so I can pick the format that makes sense based on the class I am taking. They also do buyback. I like doing everything on one site.
How much is the average cost of an e-book?
Check out this site http://www.bookase.com, A price comparison search engine for books and textbooks. It searches for the lowest prices among the major online stores worldwide and also offers discount coupons. You can also choose among various shipping options to calculate the lowest price