Books are so expensive!!!

[leepatn]

So, I am starting my prereqs in a couple weeks and the books are so expensive! Even to rent! Where did you guys buy/rent your books?

[LpntoRN2be]

Bookrenters, and different places. Get isbn number and shop around

[NurseSpeedy, ADN, LPN, RN]

My school has a board where students can pin up their lists of books for sale with contact information. Some students send out a general message discussion post with the books that they are selling. You may want to see if your school has something like this. I bought all mine the first two quarters off of amazon for a 20% discount because I didn't know that these kind of advertisements were actually posted all over campus since I was strictly online the first six months. I could have saved a bunch.

If you have to rent or buy, if it's a book that you will need for more than one class over the course of the program (not pre-requisite books) then I would suggest buying it because it will probably end up costing less than renting it in the end (you can also mark the heck out of it if you own it). Books that are only an edition or two older than the current text are usually similar. Asking the instructor may or may not help. I had bought the A+P book right after getting my LPN and quickly realized that just starting out as an LPN, working 40 hours and going to school with 13 credit hours that semester and one of them being A+P probably would not have a good outcome so I dropped the class and took it the following year. The book had changed. My lecture teacher told me that I had to have the newest book (I already paid over $200 for the stupid thing!)...my lab teacher (who was my lecture teacher the year before for all of a week) told me that the information was identical, paragraph for paragraph. Some of the pictures were brighter and they swapped the text page with the picture page at times, but no difference in the material...I didn't buy the new book and did fine.

Never, ever buy the book from a college bookstore new...EVER.