I’ve been meaning to write a piece on this topic for quite some time now. I have a pretty strong opinion when it comes to the topic of textbooks, so if you ever find yourself on the fence about buying a textbook, maybe my trial and error will help you out.
Although I use my iPad for a bunch of school-related things, I am generally pretty old-school when it comes to reading and books. I have never been a big fan of ebooks, as I have always felt they made it more difficult to comprehend what I was reading. So in most cases, I try to opt for a physical copy of whatever textbook I need over an ebook. However, I don’t necessarily do this for all classes. Here are a few specific cases and how I go about buying a textbook for them.
For classes that you have taken before (for me one of these examples was I took AP Statistics in high school, but Stevens doesn’t take AP credit for it). In this case, I was already confident in my knowledge of the subject, so having the textbook as an extra resource wasn’t very necessary for me. In cases like this, I would just try to find a free PDF of the textbook so as to not spend any money.
While finding a free PDF can theoretically work for any class, I usually prefer having a physical copy of whatever textbook I need because it is just a lot easier for using the index, finding resources in the back of the book, and comprehension. Specifically for classes covering new material, especially when I don’t know anyone who has taken the classes before or anyone in my class, I opt to purchase a physical copy of the textbook. Even though I buy a lot of textbooks, you should know that I never pay full price for a textbook. There are plenty of websites where you can find new or used textbooks at reduced prices.
I have a go-to process for getting the best price on my textbooks, so I’ll fill you in. The first thing that I do is a quick Google search of the isbn code on a few websites: amazon.com, thriftbooks.com, alibris.com, abebooks.com, and booksrun.com. I have had success using all of these websites thus far, and do recommend them. The only thing I will caution about is textbooks that are marked as the “international edition” may have different isbn codes than the one you searched indicating that they have different content. I accidentally ordered an international edition of a textbook once and not only did it take a month and a half to be delivered, all of the numbers for the questions in the back were in different units, so I was unable to use the book to do homework problems.
In general, I always air on the side of buying or finding some version of my textbooks rather than just forgoing them altogether because I find that they are a great resource for whenever you are struggling to understand a topic and class resources just aren’t cutting it.
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