Textbooks can be surprisingly expensive for many students.  The problem is made worse by university professors who publish their own textbooks and require their students to buy them to drive sales.  Worse still, they may come out with new versions of the book every few years that contains little new content but entirely different page numbers, deliberately making it difficult to use an older version of the book.

Here are a few ways to make buying textbooks a little less painful, and maybe even a little bit profitable.

1. Sell Them On Half.com

Instead of tossing your old textbooks at the end of the semester, trying selling them on half.com and recovering about 80% of what you paid.  The process is fairly easy.  All you do is type in the books ISBN and it pulls up an image of the book, description, and suggested selling price for you.

Trying selling them around peak time (the start of the next semester) for highest demand.  Get free packing materials from USPS.com and use priority mail (with flat rate envelopes if they’ll fit) for the best shipping rate.  You can print shipping labels right from Paypal.com.

Oh, and while you’re at it, buy your text books on half.com too!  The campus bookstore is usually the highest price you can pay.

2. Sell Your Friends Textbooks Too!

Most students complain about the price of textbooks, but don’t follow step #1.  So at the end of the semester or when people are moving in/out of dorms, you can often find huge piles of textbooks that people are too lazy to move or take with them.  Think about those stacks of textbooks as stacks of $50 bills!

Help your buddies clean out their dorm rooms and you could end up with a very profitable set of text books that you can now sell.

3. Tell Your Professors About The Future Of Textbooks

Sites like TextbookRevolution.org have made it their mission to solve this problem of overpriced textbooks.

From their website:

Textbook Revolution is the web’s source for free educational materials. This is a student-run, volunteer-operated website started in response to the textbook industry’s constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value.

TBR’s mission is to drive the adoption of free textbooks by teachers and professors. We want to get these books into classrooms. Our approach is to bring all of the free textbooks we can find together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top and find their way into the hands of students in classrooms around the world.

In the internet age there is no reason why textbooks can’t be largely digital and free.  This makes them easier to update and they can still be easily read, either by releasing versions for the Amazon Kindle or creating inexpensive print-on-demand copies.

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