A good way of getting cheap textbooks is to use a price alert service that notifies you when the price of a new or used book drops below a certain price. When you don’t need the text in a hurry, and would rather save money and buy used, that works well, because students often want to get rid of a textbook in a hurry and offer it for sale at far below the typical used price for that book. Those deals tend to go pretty quickly though.
Another good idea is to buy the previous edition, especially for texts that have many editions. When the 8th edition of a textbook is going for $80 used, you can often get the 7th edition used for ridiculously cheap (like $10 or $15), and the previous edition was often released just a few years ago (some texts have a new edition every few years) and has only minor differences.
A good way of getting cheap textbooks is to use a price alert service that notifies you when the price of a new or used book drops below a certain price. When you don’t need the text in a hurry, and would rather save money and buy used, that works well, because students often want to get rid of a textbook in a hurry and offer it for sale at far below the typical used price for that book. Those deals tend to go pretty quickly though.
Another good idea is to buy the previous edition, especially for texts that have many editions. When the 8th edition of a textbook is going for $80 used, you can often get the 7th edition used for ridiculously cheap (like $10 or $15), and the previous edition was often released just a few years ago (some texts have a new edition every few years) and has only minor differences.