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It's back to school time for college students, they've registered for classes, figured out their housing and now it's time to think about their textbooks.  This is often a huge expense for students, the Student Public Interest Research Group's Make textbooks affordable campaign reports that students spend an average of $900 each year on textbooks, but much of this cost is avoidable.  Students can use BookFinder.com to help reduce their textbook costs.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Jennie Kushner from the University of Alabama newspaper (The Crimson White), she was asking what students should do to help shave down their textbook costs. 

I explained that buying their books early, inquiring about old editions, and buying used textbooks were the three easiest things that a student could do to save money but in the end they should compare prices and shop around.  She obviously took my advice to heart because she picked a bundle of books and compared prices on BookFinder.com to her college bookstore and found that BookFinder.com would save 60% over the college bookstore.

Five books covering a wide variety of subjects from the SUPe Store’s Tutwiler location totaled $469.30 without taxes. Using BookFinder.com the same books totaled $184.09, including shipping. That is a total savings of $285.21. - Crimson White

The one thing that Ms. Kushner forgot to mention in her article was that while textbook rentals can be a very powerful savings tool, and that we highly recommend considering them, when you compare the price of a textbook rental to the price of buying the textbook you need to factor in the resale price you will receive when you sell the textbook at the end of your semester.

Many people forget about this because college bookstores are famous for paying pennies on the dollar for used textbooks but now that selling textbooks online, or textbook buyback, has become commonplace online students are able to get a good chunk of their money back.  I will do the math on this in a post next week and show how to make the most of our textbook buyback marketplace, where you compare offers from several textbook merchants who are all competing to buy your textbook back from you.