You understand the textbook industry. You know how to get your textbooks on the cheap. Now it’s time to wrap up this series and become a Textbook Pro.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

Me: Hi bookstore cashier! I’d like to sell back these textbooks.

Cashier: Sure thing. I’ll give you $32.50 for your accounting book, $8 for your microeconomics book and a high-five for your Excel modeling book.

Me: But I paid $200 for that accounting textbook! And $125 for the other two! Each!

Cashier: Well come back tomorrow and we probably won’t buyback any of them.

Me: Give me my $40.50.

Knowing how to consistently get the best resale value for your books will save you as much, if not more money than getting the best purchase prices. Unfortunately, students tend to neglect this part of the textbook process for one main reason: it requires work.

Buying a book online, at your bookstore or from the classifieds is a relatively easy process even if you have to do some shopping around. Selling your books, on the other hand, requires forward thinking, good timing, learning to set an appropriate price and maybe some haggling or shipping. Which is why students settle for the first bookstore price they’re offered. I know that looking at your Physics textbook after finals week makes you want to cut your throat with a rusty butter knife but have some patience. Learn how to properly evaluate all your selling options and choose the right one. I’ve even turned a profit on textbooks by being diligent.

The Bookstore/Independent Textbook Purchasing Services. We get these little trailers on campus around finals time with names like “John Buys Books!” They are buying students’ books for a business and reselling them through websites like Amazon and Half. Shop around. Regardless of how you decide to sell your books, you should always check the local buyback prices to get some idea of what your book is worth.

In my experience the campus bookstore pays a higher price for your used books than the independent bookstore/purchasing service most of the time. Regardless, timing is the most important aspect to getting a good price for your textbooks. You need to sell the book before everyone else does, because your bookstore has a buyback quota and there will be diminishing buyback prices as the store gets closer to reaching it. Think in terms of the final exam. 99.9% of your classmates will sell the book back after their final. Your best bet is to go a few days before the final exam but realistically you’ll need the book to study. If you don’t you probably shouldn’t have bought it in the first place. I recommend going directly from the final exam to the bookstore. I know your brain is fried but it could be the difference between $80 and $0 in your pocket. Sometimes I get a better price from the bookstore than anywhere else because I make sure to sell my books ASAP. On the other hand your bookstore may not buy the book at all because your professor has updated the edition or switched textbooks for the class next semester. Worry not, for you have other options.

Classifieds. If you’re not happy with your bookstore’s price, selling your book in the classifieds is a great chance to get more money than the bookstore will give you. List your book in your university’s (probably) free classifieds multiple times in the week leading up to, and first few weeks of the next semester. If you are morally flexible and have an old edition that the bookstore won’t buyback you can probably convince the next student that your edition is the one they need. The classifieds are great because you just have to take 20 minutes out of your life and meet someone on campus and you’ll get paid in cash. However, you deal with issues like setting a proper price and there’s always a chance you may not sell the book at all. If your class was really small there may only be a few students buying the book through the classifieds. Pricing should run somewhere between the bookstore buyback price and the lowest price you can get for the same book used online or at a bookstore.

Online. I have no experience selling my textbooks online because I never wanted to deal with the shipping. However, from what my friends have told me it usually offers the best resale value for books as well as an honest way to try and get some value out of old editions. You get to market your book to the whole world instead of just your campus. But, like the classifieds, there’s a chance you won’t sell it. On a positive note, unlike the classifieds, you only have to list your book one time.

List your textbooks on multiple sites to give yourself the best chance to find a buyer. Amazon.com, Half.com and Abebooks.com are a few good sites off the top of my head. Give it a try and keep in mind demand is highest for books at the beginning of the semester. Most schools run on a semester system so think January and September as your best chances of selling your textbook for the best price. Price your book competitively on each website and be sure to be honest, descriptive and ship immediately. Online buyers will rate you as a seller on the website which could greatly help or hurt your chances of selling online in the future.

Book Trades.  Although you wouldn’t get cash for this kind of transaction, the best resale value for your book could be, well, another book. You got a friend or acquaintance who is taking a class you’re taking next semester and vice versa? Trade your textbooks. It’ll save you the effort of both buying and selling a textbook. However, ensure to check the book requirements for the next semester’s class in case anything changes as well as working out a way to split the resale value of the books at the end of the trade ahead of time.

Got all that? Good. Go use this information. Impress your friends. Save a lot of money. Plan that Spring Break trip and don’t worry about working all those extra hours welcome week. You are now a textbook pro.

Now that you have a strong grasp on the textbook industry, let’s see if we can’t slash your next semester’s textbook costs. Here are a few tried and true methods to save money:

Shop Around

This one should be obvious. If you’re at a large university like mine, chances are there are a few local bookstores. We have a campus bookstore, an independent bookstore, local or school classifieds and, of course, the option of buying the book online. In this case, being lazy may be very expensive. If a particular edition of a textbook has been in existence for more than a semester, chances are there are some used editions floating around somewhere. Check all your local bookstores, classifieds and online, using websites like bigwords.com to compare prices, and find the cheapest used book. However, when shopping online or in classifieds, be careful of what you buy. Make sure the edition is correct and that you aren’t buying the international or teacher’s edition. When you can’t find a particular book for less than $100 anywhere and you magically find a few editions on a website for $40, you’re probably not getting exactly what you need.

Buy Old Editions

If there have been three editions of a particular class’s textbook in the past five years, chances are the author isn’t changing much with each new edition. Unless your class requires a new book for the codes to some online program, you can probably get an older edition for much, much cheaper and use it for the class without problems. You can find old editions online for really cheap or buy them from some poor student on campus who paid $200 for the last edition then couldn’t sell it back to the bookstore. Just beware that the resale value of an old edition is probably crap so make sure you can get it really cheap. Also, talk to students who have taken the class before. Do you have to turn in homework problems from the book? Are there particular sections that you need to know virtually word-for-word for tests? Old editions may not have the updated content you need for the class which could adversely affect your grade.

Share Books

Again, you’ll need to talk to students who have taken the class before you. If you don’t need the book for an online code, you may be able to split the cost of a particular textbook with another student. However I recommend a lot of caution when trying to save money on textbooks this way. On one hand you cut your textbook costs in half and you’ll always have a study partner. On the other hand you may have just committed yourself to a hellishly long semester of trying to coordinate schedules and fight for the book near exam time just to save $50.

For another take on sharing, if you and a friend have to take the same class and you’re taking the class this semester and they’re taking it next semester, plan the textbook deal in advance. You may be able to work out a system to split the cost and then the resale value. Be aware that your professor may change editions between semesters, therefore potentially screwing up this plan, but I find you tend to be pretty safe in this regard between fall and spring semesters. Try emailing the professor and explaining the situation if you’re concerned this may happen.

Don’t Buy the Textbook

I wouldn’t recommend this to first semester freshmen, but if you talk to students who have taken the class and feel like you have a handle on how your school or a certain professor does things, you may be able to just skip buying the book altogether. The most useless textbooks in my experience are the supplementary books that the professor still deems “mandatory.”  For example, I’ve taken three classes in business school that have revolved heavily around the use of Microsoft Excel. There’s always an Excel modeling textbook that the professor says is mandatory to buy but I have never cracked one open.  To me, that’s an easy $40 I can save for a semester. However, if you figure you probably won’t need it and just decide not to buy it, you run the risk of annoying the shit out of your classmates when you’re constantly borrowing their books.

Buy the International Version?

I put a question mark on this section because I’ve never tried buying the international version. The IV is, 99% of the time, substantially cheaper than the original version of the textbook, new or used, and can usually be found online. I’m not sure what the difference is but if you feel like taking a chance go ahead and buy one and compare. I’ve heard it’s just a paperback version of a particular textbook and there really are no major differences. In fact, I’m going to try buying one next semester.

So now that you’re an expert on the inner-workings of the textbook industry and you know the best ways to save money on your textbook purchases, you need to know how to get the best resale value. It’s the final part of the Textbook Pro series and, in my opinion, the most neglected part of the whole textbook process. Don’t miss it.

I finished writing my post about textbooks and I realized it was crazy long. So I’m breaking it into a three-part series called Textbook Pro. In the first part, this part, I will explain why textbooks are so expensive and explain, basically, how the industry works. In the second part I will explained my tried and true techniques for getting your textbook needs filled on the cheap. And finally, in the third part, I will teach you how to get the best resale value. Enjoy!

I paid $700 for textbooks this semester. $700! And believe me there’s some poor schmuck of a med student out there somewhere who dreams of the day that she only has to pay $700 for one semester’s worth of books.

Textbook prices can be absolutely ludicrous but worry not because I will teach you ways to save hundreds of dollars on your books, especially at the undergraduate level. If you put a little time and effort into research and planning, I promise you can save a substantial amount of money.

First off, why are textbooks so expensive? I had the manager of the local bookstore explain it to me like this:

You write a collegiate-level textbook called, say, Intermediate Basket Weaving. A company publishes the book and markets it to all the basket weaving professors in the country and some of them decide that your textbook is on the cutting edge of modern basket weaving techniques and they implement its use in their classes. That first semester, all the students of these professors have to go to the bookstore and pay full retail price for your book because it’s a brand new 1^st edition and buying used is not an option. Some may even be ill-informed enough to rent it, but that’s a whole different conversation. Your publisher gets paid, you get paid, the bookstore gets paid and the teacher gets paid. Everyone is happy except for the students who just blew a round-trip ticket from Chicago to Cancun on some stupid gen-ed class’s textbook.

Now, after the basket weaving professors of the country use this edition for a few semesters, there are a significant number of used IBW books floating around and no one is buying your 1^st edition textbook new anymore. This is great for the bookstores, because they make a better profit on used books, and students, because they can get used books for a fraction of the price of new ones. However, you and your publisher aren’t happy because the used book market cuts you two out of the action. So what do you do? Go fix a few errors in the book. Add a few sections. Better yet, make a website with extra study material and quizzes and put one-time use codes for the site in your new books. All of the sudden, you have a new edition. Your publisher and you go to all the basket weaving professors of the country again and explain how your new book is even more cutting edge than the last, that it’s revamped and your new website will take their students’ basket weaving abilities to the next level. You don’t have to worry about appealing to the bookstores or the students because the professors hold all the power over which textbooks students will buy. Suddenly, all the teachers implement the new edition in their classroom and students are stuck paying hundreds for the Intermediate Basket Weaving 2^nd edition and you and your publisher are getting paid again. The bookstores and students eventually sell the first edition for the price of paper scrap as demand for that book falls essentially to nothing. This cycle can occur as often as once a year depending on how aggressive the publisher and author of a particular textbook are in getting out new editions.

How do you prevent this vicious cycle from screwing you out of hundreds of dollars a semester? Stay tuned for part two…

We’re sure this comes as no surprise to many of you that tuition costs have FAR surpassed inflation, growing at an average rate of 7.74% per year since 1978, according to the Department of Education. And, a study referenced in the same TechCrunch article ranks textbooks as the second highest educational expense after tuition, room and board!

In our opinion, the textbook industry as a whole is broken and is not helping students succeed. There are exceptions, however, as some campus bookstores are finding ways to ease high costs, through textbook rental partnerships with companies like Chegg! We see renting textbooks online as one way we can help alleviate the inflated costs. In the meantime, we’d like to hear your thoughts. What other things can colleges and universities, private companies, bookstores and publishers do to mitigate the costs of your education?

This book is the third selection of the International League of Skeptical Readers Book Club. If you’ve read the book, we should have a pretty good discussion starting on it any day now, and welcome all new perspectives! Please drop by the thread at the ILS Discussion Forum. We are a pretty friendly bunch, and even quite international in other topics. I’m having trouble getting a cohost for this book club, much less one from another continent, so the books I’m choosing are the ones that have been published in America (and thus more readily available to American members, who can get their hands on the books and participate more than the people from elsewhere). I am cognizant of the disconnect between the membership roster and the group name. I choose to find the humor in it.

The Review

The Language Police:
How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn

Long Story Short: This book describes the cultural bias and sensitivity review process that textbooks undergo to make them politically and morally acceptable to special interest groups, and the effects watered-down curriculum has on student populations.

Why I Chose This Book: I used to be a teacher and I currently work within educational publishing, so the topic interested me personally, and I am always curious to read arguments from both sides of the political correctness movement.

The Book’s Strengths: If the author’s intent was to get a reaction, it succeeded. The book presents a thorough explanation of how the bias and sensitivity standards of textbook censorship have developed over time, and presents a definite insider’s view of the textbook industry and its relationship to the government’s control of school curriculum. Ravitch provides specific examples of the kinds of deselection and excising of materials from textbooks that exist, the names of the companies that engage in it, before and after portrayals of how books and stories have been changed after bias and sensitivity review, the process of textbook adoptions and what states have the largest influence on the market, how individual state standards influence textbook editors and publishers, which pressure groups lean on textbook publishers to make changes, how they effect such changes, and how the idea that bias and sensitivity review is important has become commonplace and remains unexamined by industry participants. After the main body of the text, there are more than sixty pages of appendix materials: a list of banned words and a list of the author’s recommendations for instructional materials to supplement textbooks.

The book feels comprehensive, and it is an easy read. The author uses straightforward, non-academic language that draws you into her emotions and astonishment for a shared experience; she makes you feel you are being personally betrayed, so the reader-text connection is very strong. I think she also does a very good job of writing a history book according to rules she implicitly sets (there’s no outright definition): she presents an interesting topic and makes you want to research it even more so that you can come to your own conclusions of events. The book highlights a real problem, and runs through the steps of providing evidence to support her claim that the problem exists, that it is getting worse, and that it has a profound affect. The author’s credentials and experience lend weight to her claims—she is a historian and an educational publishing consultant at very high levels—and she takes a stand on why this problem matters and what people can do to fix it.

The Book’s Weaknesses: The book really works you up into a right state; I was ready, after reading the prologue, to go get my pipe wrench out of the garage and start smashing cars. The examples she uses of expunged text are probably true and definitely outrageous, but they are so outrageous that it just makes me a little suspicious that she is presenting us the most effective anomalies (cherry-picking data, if you like). Her tone is often snide, and there are very long passages where she overwhelms the reader with too many examples and hammers at the same point over and over again. She paints the villains (feminists, ethnic groups, and religious sects) as giant monolithic groups who behave and think exactly alike across time and geography. For example, at the start of Chapter 4, “Everybody Does It: The Testing Companies” (on pg. 51 in my book), she writes that

Feminist critics maintained that this gap was caused entirely by sexist language.

Not only is this a gross generalization, she provides no sources or references to even one specific feminist who maintained that ALL test score differences were to blame ENTIRELY on sexism in test scores. When authors start to hyperbolize like that, it makes the book seem like its own kind of biased screed. In the middle of Chapter 8, “Literature: Forgetting the Tradition,” on a single page—pg. 118—she implies first that most teachers rely only on textbooks to select materials for their class and then claims that students experiencing grief do not benefit from reading teen novels about adolescents also coping with grief and that they would be better served by the classic poets, yet cites no sources for either. This is on the same page!

In Chapter 9, “History: The Endless Battle,” she gives a very compelling reason that these changes to textbooks are so detrimental to students’ understanding of historical events:

The books frequently quote historical figures or offer data without giving any sources for teachers and students who want to learn more, failing to demonstrate by deed the importance of presenting verifiable evidence. The reader must take it on faith that the information presented to them is accurate, because there is no way to check up on it.

This is very important, and everyone should realize this flaw in the textbook paradigm of the current age. Sadly, Ravitch repeats this problem in her own book, and it makes the book too easy to pick apart and dismiss—even when you feel in your heart that probably every word she says is true.

What Should Have Happened: The book did not need so many examples of textbooks and test items that were expunged. There should have been far fewer lists and far more explanation of why this is a serious problem, and far more data to support the claim that it actually is a problem. Is it true that most teachers rely on the textbook and introduce no other materials? Does it matter if standardized test questions are devoid of artistic or literary content? Is the role of the school to teach classics? Does it matter if students read novels by minority and women authors who will be forgotten in ten years? Her criticisms of how important classics have been “cleaned up” to please pressure groups are justifiably scathing, but she goes off on authors that are outside the established canon without ever really defending the value of the canon. It’s a pretty big assumption that everyone agrees the European classics are basically the best thing for everyone to be reading. At least she should have made the argument that the artistic merit of these works has stood the test of time!

The big question—So what?—needs a much better answer.

Short Story Shorter: I would definitely recommend this book. It’s readable, and it raises awareness to a topic that most people are probably interested in for one reason or another.