I HATE people in the business of...

I feel your guys' pain, i spent $300 on two books this quarter!! I think for spring i am either going to try and find my books off amazon or pull off some used stickers and put them on the books i need. Hopefully the *******s in the book store won't notice. We'll see.

EDIT: the unfortunate part is im a math and science major (well Engineering to be exact) so it's not like i can really skate by not having any books

 

Buy the books folks..even second hand (which is best). I have a huge collection of automotive text books and other text books that I bought when going to colledge. I can't count the number of times I have refered back to them for stuff I have forgotten or just plain didn't know or understand. They are worth the investment IMHO. Heck I sometimes pick them up and browse though them for a small refreash whenever I feel the need (or when there is nothing else to read while sitting on the pot LOL).

 

They do come in handy at times. There are a few of them which I'll keep for references and guides, and will later hand them down to my brother when he start college.

 

$400 odd this semester for 4 or 5 books

I got my $130 psych book free though

 

I used to buy older editions of textbooks. For example, the Chemistry book we used might have been the 8th edition for $120 at the campus bookstore. But they would have the 7th edition in the bargin bin for $5. The people who write the books change the problems, but 98% of the text remains the same. I would find a good looking girl in the class and offer to study with her, and we would do the problems out of her book. There was no way of avoiding buying the lab manual. For some classes like history, you don't need a textbook at all. The lecture should be enough to get a good grade. Plus, if you like reading, chances are you've already read works by David McCullough, Ron Chernow, etc (for example if you're taking an early American history course you probably will learn more from those books than the textbook). Plus, if you can find someone in class to loan you their book for a weekend (I'd offer $5 bucks for a friday, saturday, and sunday loan period). It is more than enough time to read a history book cover to cover and take notes. Plus, since you've read the whole book the first week of class, you will be better able to participate in classroom discussions, and you will better understand the lectures. There are some books you will have a hard time not buying, like math texts. They change the problems every edition on purpose.

I was in student government in college and we attempted to set up a textbook sharing program. For example, you would agree to come in and share your Calculus textbook, and another student would share his Physics textbook for 2 hours. But the university forced us to shut down that program. It is a shame, because it was catching on. We also tried to start a program where students could write public reviews of professors, but the university forced us to shut down that program as well. There are some professors in universities that do not deserve tenure. The last program we tried to set up was a student to student book sales. Instead of using the bookstore as the middleman, we set up a system where students could sell textbooks at the end of the semester to students who would need the same text next semester. But the university shut down that program as well, saying the bookstore had an exclusive right to sell on campus. So all that we could do was buy a can of Pepsi for $1.35 (Coke was not available because the university decided to only sell Pepsi). Maybe we should have tried to sell Pepsi cans for $0.25 cents, but I bet the university would have shut that down too. Looking back on my days in student government, it makes me wonder what the purpose of student government was.

 

Just spent $525 on books for 5 classes and more to buy. My daughter had to get an Algebra book that cost $125 + the cost of a workbook.

It is a complete scam that professors 'write' these books and then require thier students to buy them at inflated prices.

 

Amen. And furthermore they're lying bastards most of the time, particularly when it comes to history/politics hell anything really.

 

???

Hey, I'm not trying to be mean, but don't turn into a crazy right-wing protest guy. I know there are clusters of radical groups like that in WA and ID (the "constitutionalist" guy I knew was in WA, said that Eastern WA was a hotspot for their movement). There are better ways to make changes than on the fringes. It's already hard enough that many Easterners think people from the rural Rocky Mtn area are militia member fascists.

 

Yep, completely agree with this thread. When I was at uni I spent over £1k on books in three years. There seems to be some law that educational books must cost about 5 times more than would be reasonable to charge.

What really gets me though is how badly written most of these things are. I guess the second rule of educational books is that if the concepts are simple then use the most complex means of explaining them.