What is the DEAL with these textbooks?

mommync3 · Aug 14, 2009

Same here. I had to buy all my books this semester new because of the access codes and cd's. For two classes, my books were $550. I did not want to chance it with Amazon. Last semester, I had a seller on Amazon send me the wrong book so I still had to go to the book store to purchase the book for class. The seller would never return any of my emails. I lost $150 to that seller.

2ndLife · Aug 14, 2009

Sounds like it's safer just to get what you know you need from the uni bookstore. Sure doesn't make me want to spend anything on the recommended texts, though. Yeowza!

FLDoula · Aug 14, 2009

My books were the same way. Packaged specifically for my school (PJC-FL Panhandle) My books were about $700.

PacoUSA, BSN, RN · Aug 14, 2009

Yeah FLDoula and I had this conversation on another thread, almost seems like it's a racket here in Florida. I had the same thing on my end for my A&P, but I managed to rent that text from Chegg without the codes or whatever and I still aced the class. Bookstores are just trying to get back the competition, that's all it really boils down to.

nkara, CNA · Aug 14, 2009

Holy crap... what that for the nursing books? I'm still taking pre-req's and the cost isn't that high. I'm kinda not looking forward to that bill!!

FLDoula · Aug 14, 2009

Holy crap... what that for the nursing books? I'm still taking pre-req's and the cost isn't that high. I'm kinda not looking forward to that bill!!

No, these were for pre-reqs... Scared to see what the textbooks for nursing are going to cost. I have 2 college kids at UCF. They've been thrifty about getting their texts but in recent years it's much more expensive. My son is in Aerospace Engineering and daughter a grad student in International Relations/Foreign Policy. Daughter says only difference between undergrad and grad is that as a grad you have to buy 4 texts instead of 1! :scrm: Our bookstore at PJC is not owned by PJC. They are efollet. Books are a huge racket! With these "packages" they are making it more difficult to go outside those dedicated bookstores now.

peytonsmom · Aug 14, 2009

My textbooks for Intro to Nursing and Pathophys where $767 w/ tax. There were 11 books and two study guides. I was more than willing to pay for those though considering those books will be reused through another nursing course and they will be useful to me during my career.

Now my dh on the other hand is taking a humanties course, a basic math, and a natural science w/o lab course. He will never have a use for any of those books again. The bookstore wanted $412 for those three books! I couldn't believe that!

Kyla.ann · Aug 14, 2009

I purchased my lab book online "new in package" for about 50% less than the bookstore on campus was charging and it came with all the materials (codes, CD's, etc). I also purchased my A&P textbook used at an off campus bookstore around my house for way cheaper than on campus and the code in the book wasn't even used yet.

Granted, I did search around for about 2-3 weeks but if you take your time you can find a good deal with everything you need. Plus, if the codes are scratched off the used books already, you can purchase a new code on the website. Might still be cheaper to go that route than buying from the campus bookstore.

Freedom42 · Aug 14, 2009

Yes. E-mail the seller and ask if the CD and codes are included. I've done that on a number of occasions and never had a problem. Some people just don't think to mention that the CD is included in the sales listing. The code is usually printed on the inside hard cover or a page within the book.

CyclicalEvents · Aug 14, 2009

Nobody should ever spend that much on textbooks. My first semester of college I bought all the books for every class for 400$, ended up using only 1 of them the entire semester, and sold them all back for a meager 40$! I never made that mistake again.

From then on I've only ever bought international editions (they are the same thing as the US copies, except they say NOT FOR SALE IN THE US on the corner :chuckle: and they are usually a fraction of the cost).

Even now I've learned to save even more money. My last semester the books that I planned on getting for the classes that I figured actually would use them would've cost me $350 used, but I ended up spending only 40$. How did I manage this? I discovered the wonderful world of Previous Editions.

You see the book publishers/authors realized years ago that when they put out a book, they sell a lot of copies the first year, but then all those bought books end up being sold back to book stores for very low dollars, and the bookstores would then jack the price up, but still keep the used copy price lower than a new copy. They made tons of money this way. This ****** off publishers and authors who want your money so they cut deals with schools to only use the latest edition of their textbooks, the idea being that knowledge changes over time so you want your students to have the most recent information. Theoretically it's a win-win situation; Publishers make money, students learn the most recent information.

Unfortunately, the fact is, a hell of a whole lot of information doesn't change over time, or if it does it's relatively minimal. The textbook industry has money to make though so they find a way - by revising textbooks to make spellings corrections and rearranging the chapter order. For many (I'd even say most) revised editions of textbooks it's unlikely that you'll even be able to spot the differences between a previous and new edition, without going page by page.

For my A&P class our prof would constantly tell us that the newest edition was the only edition we should have in her class. She'd literally market the it to us at the beginning of class for the first few weeks of class (I think she was getting a cut of the profits or something). I went out and bought the previous edition for about 180$ less, and can only recount 2 instances in which the diagrams didn't match up with the newest edition. Not like they updated any of the pictures (they were actually all the same diagrams/drawings/examples as the previous edition. I mean like, in class she said refer to figure 2.5, and in the previous edition it'd be like figure 2.6 where I'd find what I needed.) 95% of the time the previous edition and the newest edition were exactly the same. The only actual difference was the chapters were in different order.

This went on a bit longer than I meant for it to be. Anyway, my advice to you is to seek out previous editions. Sure the material is 2 years older, but hey, how often does a new discovery in any field, let alone one aspect of a field, change the entire knowledge base such that everything that was previously known is no longer usable/applicable? In addition, most professors have been teaching this stuff for years and probably aren't going to deviate from their syllabus by very much to accommodate.

2ndLife · Aug 15, 2009

Up until now I've never paid so much for textbooks. The A&P book I don't mind spending the money on because I'll use it for 2 semesters. It's the other pre-req books that caused me to gasp. One for Nutrition and the other for Growth and Devel. I'm taking both classes online and was specifically told that I MUST have the CDs and access codes. There wasn't much of a price difference between the uni's books and Amazon. I've been burned with sellers telling me that all the supplements, etc. are included. I emailed a few. A couple never responded, one said there was no guarantee and the other said they were included. Not good odds. This is my future I'm talking about. I hate the textbook racket, but what's a person to do when the instructors utilize the CDs and access codes?