College bookstores are the enemy. High prices, long lines, and a horrible textbook buyback program are the biggest complaints.
Here are places you can buy, sell, rent and exchange textbooks, other than your school's bookstore.
General Online Bookstores
- Amazon - The world's biggest selection of books at low prices. Students can get free two-day shipping through Amazon Prime Student.
- eCampus - Discount bookstore saving you 50-90% off.
- Cengage - Formerly iChapters, with options to buy, rent, download, or order chapters of books.
- Barnes & Noble - This bookstore giant usually has fair pricing of textbooks.
- Textbooks.com - Buy and sell textbooks at this site claiming to have the largest selection of used textbooks.
Recommended Resources:
Textbook Rental
- Chegg - The leader in online textbook rental.
- CampusBookRentals.com - Named one of the cheapest places to rent textbooks in a recent study.
Digital Textbooks
- VitalSource - Find your textbook as an eTextbook at a much cheaper price.
- Cengage - Many textbook titles can also be found here in digital form.
- CafeScribe - Lets you download textbooks in digital form, so it saves trees. Because of this, this service is about 50% cheaper than your normal college bookstore.
Classifieds sites
- eBay - Ebay allows you to put your book quickly up for sale at a fixed price or auction. It can also be a place to score cheap used textbooks.
- Valore Books - A marketplace for buying and selling textbooks.
Price Comparison Sites
- Book Finder - Search engine that finds the best buys on new and used textbooks for sale.
- AddAll - Price comparison agent built to ease online book shopping.
- DirectTextbook.com - Search for your books and see prices from several textbook stores where you can buy your textbooks.
- Big Words - Price comparison search engine.
- CampusBooks - Compare prices on all of your books at once.
Selling Textbooks
Many places will buy books from you. Here are a few we recommend.