The Cost of Textbooks

Five tips for getting good cheap college textbooks
1) Don’t buy them until you need them
Hold on to your cash – you don’t have much, or you wouldn’t be reading this. There are several reasons to wait: The bookstore makes mistakes on the booklist; your professor doesn’t get around to using it; and your money is better off in your pocket than invested in a book you won’t get to for 4 months.
2) Buy your college books online
There’s a reason more students are buying books online – it’s cheaper! Don’t tie yourself to a particular website – use a website with a good search engine to find the lowest priced textbooks, like discountcampusbooks.com.
3) The campus bookstore is not your friend
Campus bookstores and publishers work together to keep you buying your books on campus. They create custom books and special bundles with ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) that you can’t find on the net. Often these are slimmed down versions of a standard textbook, or contain web access codes you may not need. HOT TIP – If you go to the publisher’s website, you can search for the ISBN and find out what the components are. Then get the book online, and use your friend’s access code.
4) Buy an older edition
Some college textbooks are now priced over $200. Is it worth a few minutes of effort to save $195? If you go to a big internet bookseller’s or publisher’s website, you can look at the table of contents for most textbooks. HOT TIP – Compare the latest edition with the previous - If the chapters are the same, buy the old edition. *Note – I compare editions at my campus bookstore; sometimes there are NO changes.
5) Consider e-textbooks and rentals
Usually, the rental is a better deal. E-textbooks haven’t been priced too competitively until lately. HOT TIP – if the cost of a real book minus what you get for buyback is equal to or less that an e-textbook, get the real one. Real books are still more convenient. You can compare e-textbooks and textbook rental prices at bookbot.com.
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The Rich Manipulating the Uninformed

The Tea Partiers are wrong – wrong about their rights being under siege, wrong about Obama, wrong about healthcare reform, wrong about the constitution, wrong about guns, and wrong about history.

The Tea Party Movement is nothing more than a joint venture of Freedomworks and Fox News – a show of force for the wealthy, who once again seek to manipulate the uninformed for personal gain. It’s a cynical maneuver, whipping people who have better things to do into a frenzy over nothing much, for ratings and advertising money on one hand, and for fundraising and lobbying power on the other. Who gains? The rich who want to pay less. Fox and Freedomworks. Politicians who care about reelection more than truth. Who loses? Everyone else.

The Tea Party is not so much a political movement as a group tantrum, embracing all who buy into Fox News Channel’s paranoid fear-mongering. No matter what your disaffection, or how absurd, you have a home here. Think Obama’s a foreigner? Stand over here. The specter of socialism keeping you up? Get on the bus. Want to yell “Nigger!” at congressmen…come on in. It’s about the numbers, not the truth.

The sad truths at the center of the tantrum is that so many Americans feel abandoned by our government and can be so easily manipulated by so many wealthy, cold, willing, greedy manipulators – these are the real stories.

Yet so many media outlets ignore the real, compelling Tea Party story in favor of the empty rhetoric and slanderous signs? Laziness? Budget cuts? No journalistic integrity? All of the above.

This is a classic haves vs. have-nots story. Start telling it. It’s the real story.

“there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.” James Madison, Federalist No. 63, 1788