Cheap New and Used Textbooks

Sell Textbooks, Sell back your used textbooks for the top price.

2009-11-10T08:27:00.001-08:00

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Bob Jones 8:27am Nov 10th	Sell Textbooks, Sell back your used textbooks for the top price. To bjones_y.textbooks@blogger.com We now have 7 bookstores bidding for your used textbooks. Get the highest price for your used textbooks. Bob has shared a link with you. To view it or to reply to the message, follow this link: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=604583974&k=46AYQ453QT6G6BD1TC4XXSS2V6BAZZWCTQEV&oid=1268039906885
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Digg Story: Sell Textbooks, Sell back used textbooks for the top price

2009-11-04T23:08:00.000-08:00

I wanted to share this story with you: http://digg.com/d3199of?e
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"Sell Textbooks, Sell back used textbooks for the top price"
The Textbook Buyback Price Finder quickly reveals best place to sell textbooks online. The secret to sell used textbooks for the highest price is to comparison shop and use up-to-the-minute information. Check to see which textbook store offers the best textbook buyback price. Sell college textbooks for more money!

http://www.cheap-textbooks.com/sell-textbooks.php

College Students Should be Wary When Buying Textbooks Online

2009-10-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Number 1,374 to have your identity stolen - buying textbooks online.
Every semester millions of college attendees go online and seek out the best deals on necessary textbooks for their upcoming classes. Many know the deals are to be found online instead of the stores with large online textbook retailers like Amazon, Bigwords, Half and CampusGrotto. However there are thousands of smaller online textbook retailers that are not nearly as trustworthy. They offer crazy discounts on books but it may come in the price of losing your identity.
That’s what happened to Phil Baker of Fort Worth, Texas. After buying a textbook at “a radical discount” his debit card information was stolen. Eventually it resulted in a $1,919 withdrawl from his checking account.
College-age adults are extremely susceptible to online scams because they use computers so often. Most of their research, coursework and social interactions happen on the computer and they’re more likely to purchase items from questionable sources without security concerns. Most have ordered thousands of dollars of products and goods online without an issue and it leads them into developing bad habits.
Another factor is that most universities and colleges get students in the mindset of using their social security numbers for student IDs, roll listings, registration and even dorm admission. Students get so used to using their SSN on campus that they begin to think of it as simply their new name — a practice that many scammers are keen to exploit.Read more: http://www.lifelockpromotioncode.net/blog/college-students-should-be-wary-when-buying-textbooks-online

2009-09-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

Save Money This Semester By Utilizing Textbook Rentals
Here is a news flash for all you college students and your parents: Textbook Rentals are the way to go!
You do not have to line up at the university bookstore like lemmings and buy their overpriced textbooks. Yes, you need them for the classes, but there is a better way. In this day and time where seemingly every expense of attending college is spiraling out of control, this IS one area where you can actually do something to save yourself or your parents some money.
There are several web sites available now that specialize in online textbook rentals. I will list each of the most popular and give you some information on it.
Chegg.com
This popular website states that they are “Number one in textbook rentals,” and claims to have saved college students more than $43,000,000.00! Reading their “Cheggifesto” will give you some history on how two college student entrepreneurs started this unique online business and how passionately they feel about what they are doing. They are giving students a more affordable option and some power to say no to the professors who say “You need this 150 dollar book for my class.” Now a student can get the book, but at substantial savings.
Chegg is big on caring for the environment as well, with recyclable boxes, and a program that plants a tree for every book that is rented. It is certainly an idea whose time has come.
CollegeBookRenter.com
In researching this article and reading some of the forums I heard some folks state that Chegg.com was too slow or wasn’t as money saving as they had hoped, and that they had had better success with collegebookrenter.com.
They boldly state on their website that they can save you up to 85% of the costs of your college textbooks. They also extol the virtues of textbook rental and how great it is for the environment not to be cutting down all those trees for new books. Again, an idea whose time has come!
Skoobit.com
Skoobit, like the other rental sites, has a mission of making the process of acquiring textbooks more simple and affordable, as well as environmentally friendly. All of these textbook rental places seem to share the same mission and philosophy. The difference, apparently is in the cost and the level of service, which I suppose you would have to try out for yourself to determine which you prefer.
CampusBookRentals.com
This site is very similar to the others, but really emphasizes service. They offer free shipping both ways and have a buy back program for books as well. They also offer a 30 day “risk free guarantee,” and lots of prizes and perks for following them on Twitter.
Be sure to check out these sites for college textbook rentals. They have multiple benefits; which include substantial money savings, convenience, and environmental friendliness. Also, it sounds like they go the extra mile when it comes to customer service, something you can probably bet your college book store will not do!
Textbook rentals are becoming an increasingly popular option, and one you should check into if you are out to save some dough this semester.

E-Textbooks: A Cheap Textbook Alternative?

2009-09-23T21:27:00.001-07:00

E-Textbooks: A Cheap Textbook Alternative?

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How to Save Money on Books

2009-08-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

Drill it into your head that your campus bookstore is overpriced. But using a combination of these methods, I’ve saved hundreds of dollars on books. (My personal record for biggest savings was a $180 pair of textbooks at the bookstore for $18 total online—that’s including shipping!)
Condensed instructions for the most popular method: buying books online

Step 1. Get the ISBN for the book you need. It’s on the back cover.

Step 2. Search for the best prices on http://dealoz.com and http://bigwords.com/. They look through all the dozens of online merchants and compare prices for you, but they don’t always list the same places, so you’ll have to use both search engines.

Step 3. Use http://www.retailmenot.com/ to search for coupon codes before settling on what appears to be the cheapest option. You would enter amazon.com, abebooks.com, or whatever.
These are the same steps but with important but often neglected details spelled out:

Read the full article

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

College 101: Where are the best places to buy cheap textbooks?

2009-08-16T09:17:00.001-07:00

College 101: Where are the best places to buy cheap textbooks?

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Open-Source Textbooks a Mixed Bag in California

2009-08-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

As California moves forward with the first open-source digital textbook program in the nation this fall, the best content seems a lot less like Wikipedia and a lot more like traditional publishing.

Bulky, hefty and downright expensive, conventional school textbooks may rank as the most outdated part of our nation's public education system. Many observers, including Chris Anderson, author of Free, have speculated that crowd sourcing could help bring down the cost of textbooks and improve their quality--but chipping away at the publishing industry's last profit center has proven more challenging in practice. In 2002, the California Open-Source Textbook Project aimed to produce a history textbook via Wikibooks that it estimated could save California $200 million per year. To date, the project has never cobbled together a complete book.
Read the full story at ScientificAmerican

Calif. names digital textbooks that meet standards

2009-08-12T23:39:00.000-07:00

State education officials on Tuesday named the first 10 digital textbooks that meet California academic standards for high school math and science.

The electronic textbooks, available for use as soon as this fall, were among the first reviewed as part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Free Digital Textbook Initiative.

The "open source" material was reviewed by a state education panel to help school districts identify online learning resources. Electronic textbooks for other subjects will be reviewed in coming months.

Of the 16 digital textbooks reviewed, 10 met at least 90 percent of California's high school math and science standards, according to the governor's office. Three of the four that met 100 percent of the standards were published by the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation in Palo Alto.

The governor is promoting free digital textbooks to help cash-strapped districts save money and create interactive learning environments in California, where the government has been forced to make drastic cuts to education funding.

But some experts say many California schools don't have enough computers or teachers trained in online learning to fully take advantage of digital textbooks.

State officials counter that even classrooms without computers for every student can still use electronic textbooks, which can be downloaded, viewed on a computer monitor, projected on a screen or printed out.

Bill Habermehl, Orange County's superintendent of schools, said the governor's initiative will help accelerate the shift toward online learning by validating the academic content in digital textbooks.

"Our problem is going to be funding," Habermehl said. "We have countries we look at as Third World using digital textbooks more than California."

Digital Textbooks and “Fair Pricing”

2009-08-03T22:53:00.001-07:00

Digital Textbooks and “Fair Pricing”

Those who know me personally know I have a strong desire to see digital textbooks succeed. I think it has the potential to deliver a Win-Win for most of the major stakeholders, including the authors, the publishers, the environment (potentially) and the students.¹Perhaps the biggest challenge facing everyone in this is how to achieve that “win-win”and this involves a mix of pricing, availability, and convenience. I hope to address that in this post.

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Rent, Read and Return

2009-08-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.

Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry's bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.

With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they're out of a library -- only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don't return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse. As a disclaimer on Chegg warns: "Highlighting in the textbook is OK -- to a certain extent. Writing in the book is not accepted."

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Wiki Used as Textbook by U of Iowa Law Class

2009-07-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde has innovated a way to use technology in her classes and teaching to her advantage. Preparing to teach a class on employment law last semester, she decided to divide the states up and give a few to each student to research extensively, and to post their work on a wiki site, using Wikipedia software. http://digg.com/d3y90H?e

We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?

2009-07-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

SUCCESS in Silicon Valley often emerges through trial and error. Willingness to buck popular trends can help, too.
Just ask Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra, the co-founders of Chegg.com, a company that rents textbooks to college students.
When the two entrepreneurs started Chegg, then called CheggPost, in 2003, they envisioned a sort of Craigslist for college campuses, a network of university-based Web sites where students would buy and sell everything from used mattresses to textbooks. Like most Internet start-ups of that time, the plan was to make money from advertising.
It didn’t turn out that way. CheggPost gained some traction on a handful of campuses but didn’t take off. Still, the experience offered a few valuable lessons.
Mr. Rashid noticed that a majority of the traffic on the site was from students looking for used textbooks. With textbooks being the largest expense for students, after tuition and room and board, and with their cost soaring, that wasn’t surprising.
Yet the Craigslist model didn’t work. When classes ended in the spring, sellers couldn’t find many buyers online and sold their used books to the college store, often for pennies on the dollar. By the time students migrated back to campus in the fall, willing online sellers were few and far between.
So, in 2007, Mr. Rashid and Mr. Phumbhra went back to the drawing board and came up with the idea of renting books. At the time, Silicon Valley venture capitalists were focused on content, social networks and other businesses that could be supported by advertising, so finding investors wasn’t easy.
“People thought we were crazy,” Mr. Rashid said.
Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company’s revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million. This year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone, Mr. Safka said.
Based on that kind of growth, the company was able to raise $25 million in December from some of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
“The textbook business was wildly inefficient,” said Mike Maples Jr., managing partner at Maples Investments, a fund that invests in young start-ups; it was one of Chegg’s first outside investors.
With demand for good deals on textbooks running high, Chegg’s success comes in large part from being able to address those inefficiencies. While Chegg primarily rents books, it is also essentially acting as a kind of “market maker,” gathering books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. That provides liquidity to the market, said Yannis Bakos, associate professor of management at the Stern School of Business at New York University.
“The model is clever,” Professor Bakos said. “If they execute well, it will be an accomplishment.”
E-commerce was all the rage with investors during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. Of course, many start-ups failed. In recent years, most of the successful ideas in e-commerce have been refinements or variations of models that had been tried before.
In the case of Chegg and some budding competitors, the inspiration was Netflix.
“We benefit from the comfort zone that people have with renting things online from Netflix,” said Colin Barceloux, the co-founder of BookRenter.com, a Chegg rival that is also based in Silicon Valley.
Alan Bradford, a senior at Arizona State University, read about Chegg in a campus newspaper in 2008 and calculated that his bill for books that semester would have been $334 with Chegg, far less than the $657 he paid. Since then, he has ordered about a dozen textbooks from Chegg.
“Nobody likes paying for textbooks,” he said.
CHEGG is shorthand for “chicken and egg,” a reference to what Mr. Rashid called students’ quandary after graduation: they need experience to get a job, but can’t get experience without having a job.
Before the company grew relatively flush from investors’ cash and hundreds of thousands of customers on more than 5,000 campuses, it had to resort to creative bootstrapping.
Chegg began renting books before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Mr. Rashid’s American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system.
But as the orders multiplied, Mr. Rashid said, so did the traffic on his credit card, leading American Express to suspect fraud and threaten to suspend the account. He said he persuaded American Express not only to keep the card active, but also to issue a couple of dozen more so Chegg could spread out the orders.
There is plenty of secret sauce to Chegg’s business, including logistics and software to determine the pricing and sourcing of books, as well as how many times a given book can be rented. The savings can vary from book to book. A macroeconomics textbook that retails for $122 was available on Chegg for $65 for one semester; an organic chemistry title retailing for $123 was offered for $33. (Round-trip shipping can add $4 to a book.)
Those kinds of savings are turning students into fans, Mr. Safka said. “Word of mouth,” he said, “has put wind in the company’s sails.”

NYTimes

Electronic textbook invades California classroom, good or bad move? - Thinkerr's Fun Blog

2009-06-30T18:46:00.001-07:00

Electronic textbook invades California classroom, good or bad move? - Thinkerr's Fun Blog

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eBooks In Classrooms: Is it Inevitable? » ZiggyTek » Blog

2009-06-29T17:25:00.001-07:00

eBooks In Classrooms: Is it Inevitable? » ZiggyTek » Blog

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Gov. Schwarzenegger wants California's schools to adopt digital textbooks

2009-06-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

Kids spend a lot of time on the Internet — listening to music, watching videos and researching schoolwork.

So why, asks Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, are students still lugging around expensive textbooks?

Schwarzenegger's "digital textbook initiative" calls for California's 6.2 million public school students to move away from hard-bound chemistry and calculus books and embrace texts in electronic form.

Schwarzenegger is pitching digital textbooks as a way for cash-strapped school districts to save money, saying that traditional hard-bound books are expensive. The state budget for textbooks and instructional materials is $350 million; in San Jose Unified, a single Algebra I textbook for 9th graders costs the district $64.77.

Open College Textbooks

2009-06-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

Created By Experts. Enhanced by Users. Free to All. It's Time for the Revolution.

A New Approach to College Textbooks. Finally.

We preserve the best of the old - books by leading experts, rigorously reviewed and developed to the highest standards. Then we flip it all on its head.

Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students – softcovers for under $30, audio books and chapters, self-print options, and more. Our books are open for instructors to modify and make their own (for their own course - not for anybody else's). Our books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.

Buy Cheap Textbooks

2009-05-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

Cash Back Shopping

2009-05-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

UTexts.ca - Free to list textbook classifieds website!

2009-05-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

utexts.ca — UTexts.ca is a website that just re-launched allowing students to list their textbooks free for other students to find. Instead of paying hundreds on a new textbook, get a used one for your class and save a bundle by using our website.

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

Textbook Classifieds: Buy, Sell, and trade textbooks

2009-05-19T17:00:00.001-07:00

This website allows you to buy and sell your textbooks directly with other students at your college. Say goodbye to the middleman.

read more | digg story

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

Cheap College Textbooks: Cheap New & Used College Textbooks,

2009-05-18T17:48:00.001-07:00

Find Cheap College Textbooks. Save up to 30% on New Textbooks and up to 90% off Used Listings at cheap-college-textbooks.us

read more | digg story

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

Eskoob.com Cheap Textbooks

2009-05-18T07:05:00.001-07:00

Provides a safe and secure marketplace environment where college students can buy cheap college textbooks.

read more | digg story

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

Download 200+ free textbooks written by professors

2009-05-16T13:36:00.001-07:00

This site has more than 200 completely free textbooks written by British professors. The books are perfect for exam prep and I read statistics. the book covered all in like 120 pages. I got an A- with a few days of work! NICE.

read more | digg story

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com

The problem for open source textbooks

2009-05-14T08:09:00.001-07:00

The task before California is to create some form of moderation so that the authority of the final product is respected. A new form of political process needs to be built from the ground-up for the new technology of textbooks to take hold.

read more | digg story

These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com