beat the univeristy bookstore

[Twaun007]

So, I pop into the bookstore on campus today to pick up Plato's Theaetetus. I figured that it would be fairly cheap since it was about the size of a small notebook and paper back so I didn't even look at the price. By the Beard of Zeus was I wrong! The cashier scanned it and it came up $52.80. Are you jk,ing? I said at an unusually loud/confused voice. Seriously 52 bucks! I told the cashier to forget about this transaction and that I would rather pee on an electric fence. I left campus furious. On the way back to my apartment I randomly stumbled upon a small used/rare bookstore. It was like a dive bar, but instead of beer they had books. So, I thought to myself and was like what the hell, I'll stop in. You know what I got there? The Philosophy of Plato, which includes Lysis, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Pheado, Protagoras, Pheadrus, Symposium, The Republic, and of course Theaetetus. How much would such a collection cost you may ask? 10 dollars! Yeah, thats right 10 bucks.

 I guess my question is why are books for collage are so expensive? Is there some type of pact that collages have with publishers? Like, we'll charge a gozillion dollars for your books if you come out with a new edition every 12 months. Then we'll buy them back for like a dollar a piece.

Seriously.......it is insane.

Oh yeah, I just want to say Boo to the Student Union Bookstore. I totally went Twaun P. Pownerton on your ass.

[nataz]

Publishers claim that for textbooks there are such small print runs that new edditions and high prices are mandatory to keep them in the black.

Take that as you will. May I suggest amazon or even craigs list.

[Sextiger]

I usually just bite the bullet and pay the ridiculous book fees most of the time, I live in a pretty small area and its pretty much impossible to find the right books in time, I would probably just order them but I don't wanna have to go through one-two weeks of classes with no books.  You usually get like 50-60% of the books cost if you sell it back to the stores anyhow.


Edit: Also, most of my professors pretty much require students to get brand new editions so 

[Moxlotus]

Get used to it.
 If you go to a professional school (dental, med, etc.) they only get more expensive and there aren't used books because everybody needs to save them for national board exams.

I dropped 800 bucks for my first semester of dental school books.  I mananged to return my physiology book because it was 6th edition and i owned the 5th edition from undergrad and the prof said that was fine.

Oh, and profs usually get a certain cut of book sales.

[Hi-Val]

Be friends with your library on campus. You can check out all of Plato's writings when you need them fo' free.

Also, look at inter-library loan. Ohio has an excellent one called OhioLINK and you can request books for free from other libraries in the state and pick them up at your library in about three days' time.

[GrandpaBelcher]

Whoo!  OhioLINK!  I remember that guy.

I know my girlfriend usually checks Amazon to see if they have any of her books available on the cheap.  Of course she's a Writing Fine Arts major, so they might be a little bit easier to find.

At any rate, buying books is better than paying rent.

[The Atog Lord]

For most Classical texts, the Perseus Project from Tufts is an amazing resource.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

[Hi-Val]

If what TAL posted doesn't help, Project Gutenberg will. Google it, I'm too lazy to link at the moment.

[LotusHead]

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

I have no idea what I am looking for, but there's the link!

[LordHomerCat]

The university bookstore here is the same way; as an engineering student, all of my books are these huge hard cover volumes, and I would say they cost an average of $140 or more a piece from the bookstore, while many can be had for half that (or less, used) online.  Basically campus bookstores are a bunch of crooks near as I can tell, and I highly recommend the internet for purchasing books.

Also, I had a PHL class this summer were we referenced the Tufts project.  It is definitely an excellent resource (we were reading parts of Nichomachean Ethics).

[Twaun007]

@TAL, Hi-Val, and LotusHead

Thanks for those links. The information that they hold is much appreciated and will help me out a ton in the future.

[Sarcasmic]

Oh, and profs usually get a certain cut of book sales.

I'd just like to de-lurk and say that this is false.  Professor's don't get a cut of book sales, unless its their own book (in which case their royalty is negligible, less than a dollar per book).  The high price of books is generally out of their hands, and most that I worked with worked hard to find more affordable options.  We even developed an online wiki-book for the logic classes we taught, to save our students $50-$80 a year.

EDIT: Some helpful hints that I used: amazon and half are great for used titles, and amazon frequently beat the price of the university bookstore on new titles.  The bookstore likes to mark up the prices since (until the internet) they basically were your only source for textbooks.  For things like Theaetatus or other older literary works, you can find many cheaper editions at bookstores all over the place.  Sometimes the prof will want a certain translation, so make sure you pay attention to that, but otherwise the $6 penguin edition will be just as good as the $50 cambridge edition.

[Meddling Mike]

It's almost as though the bookstore has both a monopoly and a captive audience for the vast majority of the product they sell. Finding the books in a random bookstore is a real stretch unless it's a fairly popular title, if it's a textbook you're completely out of luck. Amazon/Ebay can be helpful, but often unreliable and delivery can potentially take weeks.

[lewismd]

I usually bite the bullet, but my roomates have had success in buying the previous edition of textbooks for like $1 on Amazon...the different edition is usually almost the exact same thing--at least in stuff like Econ.