The Daily Campus

Issue date: 1/23/09 Section: Commentary

Textbook prices are as high as ever and students (or their parents) are now less able to afford them than in years past. Fortunately, however, students now have more help than ever in combating spiraling textbook prices.

Much of that aid is being rendered unto students passively; some professors who previously seemed uninterested in the grievous injury their required readings were inflicting on students' checkbooks are now seem eager to help combat price inflation by encouraging the usage of older editions or assigning cheaper texts.

Nonetheless, for the best savings, students will need to be proactive in their fiduciary self-help. There are many avenues through which to cut textbook costs - all of which are more difficult than slogging over to the Co-op, true. But the savings are often proportional to the difficulty - and the risk.

Online textbook retailing now offers near total coverage of any new text one could conceivably be assigned. Amazon.com alone offers most anything, and when sites such as BarnesandNoble.com and the charming BigWords.com are thrown into the mix, the odds of any required reading being unavailable through a trustworthy online source are slim.

Of course, more daring students will be willing to buy used textbooks online, which can be a considerably dicier but more lucrative proposition. Amazon.com acts as a middleman for the sales of professional and individual book resellers; as an added bonus, Amazon.com will insure your purchase. The savings can reach into the hundreds of dollars. Meanwhile, Facebook has a marketplace through which one can view used textbooks put up for sale exclusively by UConn students. As of Thursday, there were easily over 300 texts for sale, most at significant discounts.

The most valiant of Huskies may want to dip their toes into the open waters of international edition textbooks. Often the same publisher outside the U.S offers the very same textbook, new, as available in the U.S., for tens or hundreds of dollars cheaper. The legality of buying such an international edition is tricky: the rule of thumb is that an American firm cannot sell such editions in the U.S., but an individual could buy such an edition, from overseas, in the "grey market."

And there is always the opportunity to sell one's books online, as well. Surely the Co-op does the best it can on the slim margins on which it runs, but students can potentially get far more for their old texts on Facebook, Amazon.com and EBay, among other sites.

In these hard times, dropping a few Benjamins on textbooks alone can leave a bitter taste in one's mouth. It would be best if students would save 'ol Ben Franklin the stress of repeatedly trading hands by creatively using the tools available to them.

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