The listed prices of textbooks are no joke. I had two semesters and I easily dropped around $450 per semester on them! Take note that I bought USED copies from the corner bookstore on campus and online! Some whose pages were distracting to read because of the highlighting and notes written by previous students. At the end of the semester, you try to get some of your money back by selling them to the bookstore you bought from or to incoming students for a much lower price. You also hope that the edition you own will still be used the following semester. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck with it. Coffee table book then? Library donation? =)
Anyways, I remember being a wee bit annoyed at how expensive materials were. These are textbooks for education!!!! Fashion books don't even come close to the amount of money you have to pay for technical, engineering, science, finance, design textbooks!! I pined for international newsprint editions that are less than 20% of their hard bound color copy counterparts here. My Raymond Chang Chemistry
textbook back in the Philippines was Php 700 ($16 as of today's rates) ten years ago. A copy on Amazon sells for $150+!!! Yeah the fonts were a little hard to read, the pictures looked like blobs of ink but you can still study off them. Then again, $16 on a textbook back in the Philippines isn't cheap either! That's more than a day's minimum wage!
textbook back in the Philippines was Php 700 ($16 as of today's rates) ten years ago. A copy on Amazon sells for $150+!!! Yeah the fonts were a little hard to read, the pictures looked like blobs of ink but you can still study off them. Then again, $16 on a textbook back in the Philippines isn't cheap either! That's more than a day's minimum wage! Anyways, I get this email today. I think it's helpful!! Why only now when I'm done??
In a perfect world, education will be accessible to anyone who wants it, tuition/materials and all. *sigh*
Just so you know, there are cheaper ways out there to get your textbooks. Buy them online, or even rent them online. I say avoid the campus bookstore. The campus bookstores screw you twice. They charge too much for the books initially, and then they give you very little back when you sell to them. That's why I now use http://www.bigwords.com for my purchasing and selling back (and also renting if you are so inclined) They are a textbook search engine that searches all the online textbook retailers and rental sites to find you the best prices. And at the end of the semester you can use them to search for resellers to sell your book to. All the search results are organized by price so you can buy your books for the lowest prices and sell them back for the highest.
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