buying books

Published

anyone know a cheap site to buy books on?

They are so expensive!!!

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in OMFS, Dentistry.

You don't necessarily have to purchase. (If you don't want to) Have you thought of renting? If so, try Chegg, Bookrenter, amazon, eBay. Just google the ISBN # and you will find sites that have cheaper books. For all my pre reqs I rented... didn't have to deal with keeping them but I think I am going to purchase my nursing books

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Cardio-Pulmonary; Med-Surg; Private Duty.

You can get all kinds of NCLEX study guide books (great for studying during nursing school) and careplan books for dirt-cheap on BetterWorldBooks.com. Most of their stuff is $3.99 with free shipping.

They may be a couple years old, but they are still totally relevant. I would have no problem buying any NCLEX book that came out in the past ten years, honestly. Things don't change THAT much in that period of time.

Same for careplan and NANDA books. Yes, the actual NANDA phrases change from time to time, so you'll need a current book to confirm things in. But the "required" book for my program COMPLETELY STUNK in every way, shape, and form... the index was absolutely useless for looking things up. What good is a NANDA book that you can't look things up in???? So I got a couple older, dirt-cheap books and used those for all my care-plan assignments, and just confirmed the Official NANDA Phrase in the current book.

The required and recommended books for my Psychiatric Nursing course were also pretty useless when it came time to do careplans and other clinical paperwork. I had several older psych nursing books (one was over 20 years old!) that everyone in my clinical group borrowed to do their careplans. Psych really doesn't change much at all, other than drugs -- therapeutic communication is therapeutic communication no matter what decade it is.

I also purchased a few older textbooks by different authors for several of my courses. I often found that reading about a subject in a different book gave me a better understanding of the situation. (One of the authors of our assigned textbook was just snooze-worthy.... reading about the same subject by a different writer allowed me to remain conscious through the entire chapter!)

And for one course I bought the previous edition of the assigned textbook. Just because a book is the fifth edition when the sixth edition is currently in print doesn't mean that the fifth edition is outdated... it just means that the publisher wanted an excuse to sell more books, so they came out with a new edition. I always double-checked the chapter and page numbers with someone in class, just in case things got switched around (didn't want to read about the wrong subject matter!), but we never did find what the difference was between my $10 fifth edition book and their $120 sixth edition version, other than the font changed a bit. Every page and every chapter was identical!

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Critical care.

bigwords.com will take all the sites and find you the best combination, including shipping fees, buy/rent, etc. They consider amazon, half.com, and other cheap sites. Love them.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
+ Join the Discussion