Whether you’re entering college or a returning student who’s been burned by paying a premium for textbooks and selling them for a fraction of their value, you will bless Tara Siegel Bernard for her New York Times article on how to shop for textbooks.

Bernard points out that “Federal rules that went into effect in July may help ease the pain. Publishers can no longer bundle their textbooks with accompanying materials like workbooks, and they must reveal their prices to professors when making a sales pitch. Colleges, meanwhile, are now required to provide students with a list of assigned textbooks during course registration, which allows for more time for shopping before classes begin.”

Here are some tips Bernard garnered from an interview with Nicole Allen, textbook advocate at the Student Public Interest Research Groups:

Free Books. You can find them in the Google Books database. Another source is Project Gutenberg.  There are problems with this approach (incomplete or poorly reproduced texts, page numbers that don’t correspond to course requirements, etc.) but still worth a shot.

Downloads and e-texts: Check out ManyBooks.net, for instance.  E-texts are (or should be) cheaper than their paper counterparts, but you won’t be able to print them out, and at this stage of the Digital Revolution most students prefer paper textbooks.  See E-Textbooks? Another School Makes Them Sit in a Corner)

Open Source Textbooks “Students who are assigned open source textbooks can usually download a copy for free, or they can buy a printed and bound version for $20 to $40,” Ms. Allen said. See FlatWorld.

The use of so-called open source textbooks, offered by companies like Knowledge, is also on the rise. “Students who are assigned open source textbooks can usually download a copy for free, or they can buy a printed and bound version for $20 to $40,” Ms. Allen told the Times reporter.

ETextbooks Are you the type of student who is completely at ease reading on your computer or iPad and won’t be tempted to print anything out? Then consider using eTextbooks, which are digital versions of textbooks that usually sell for about half the full retail price. Another site to visit is CourseSmart.com, which Bernard described as “a consortium of major textbook publishers that provides eTextbooks that allow students to highlight and take notes electronically.” But once again, printing options may be restricted.

Renting Some schools now rent textbooks. An outfit called Rent-A-Text “has teamed with 800 college bookstores“ to drive costs down to about half of the list price. You can even highlight if you don’t get too messy about it. There’s also Chegg.com, which Bernard says “has a reputation for being the Netflix of book rental companies.” [Note however that as of this writing we were unable to open the link to Chegg.com.] Other outfits mentioned are BookRenter.com, CampusBookRentals.com, ECampus.com (“We know you’re broke. We make you less broke.”), Textbookrentals.com and Collegebookrenter.com.

Buying Online Bernard lists Campusbooks.com and Bigwords.com for new, used, and rental textbooks. She also reminds us that international editions can be cheaper. Another tip is to look for coupon codes on such sites as PromotionalCodes.com, CouponWinner.com, and PromoCodes.com.

Selling Your Textbooks “You usually won’t get the best deal from your campus bookstore. But if the store knows it will need the same book the following semester,” says Bernard, you might have some bargaining power to recover part of your original investment. “Campusbooks.com doesn’t purchase used books,” she informs us, “but it has a neat search engine that lists who’s buying and how much they’re willing to pay.” Also, you can cut out the middle man by listing your available textbooks on Facebook, Craigslist or student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups).

Finally, you might consider…

Donating Your Textbooks. For the charitable or green-minded student, consider donating or selling your texts to BetterWorldBooks.com. According to their website, as of this writing they have raised $8,554,339.14 to combat global illiteracy and saved 34,208,429 books from global landfills. We don’t know whether there are tax writeoffs for such donations but it’s definitely worth asking your accountant.

For details, read Bernard’s article in full: How to Find Cheaper College Textbooks

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.