This semester I had 4 books that would have cost me upwards of $100 dollars from the ASU bookstore or other equivalents, and in total I would have spent $491.50 on textbooks there. I did my research and used sites such as AbeBooks.com to help me find my text books for a total of $253.92, giving me back 48% in savings.
One of the tricks publishers play is making “Custom Edition” versions of books designed specifically for your class or school, often considerably marked up from the regular editions. Often times these books only have a different cover and front insert, but the content is the same. This allows them to get a new ISBN number for the book, so when you search for it nothing else comes up. However, oftentimes these books are packaged with other materials such as study guides or answer books. By going to the publisher’s websites (Pearson/Prentice Hall, Cengage, Houghton Mifflin Company, etc) you can look up the supplementary books, and often times they will list the books they are meant to accompany. If your study guide packaged with your “Custom Edition” is listed as a supplement for a non-custom version on the publisher’s website, then the material inside the book is more than likely identical to that of a regular copy.
The same can be said for books that are packaged with an “online code”. If the book includes an online code, they can change the ISBN number again. Sometimes you don’t need this code at all, and can buy the regular book outright. Other times you can go online to the publisher’s website again and buy the code directly from them for less.
The best way to find cheaper books however, is to find an “International Copy”. Books in the United States are expensive because they know that a lot of students are on scholarships, loans, grants and have help from mom and dad. We know that books are expensive, but we keep buying them. Often times these books are published overseas and sold for much, much less than they are sold for in the United States. The best place I have found to search for books like this is AbeBooks.com.
When searching for international copies often times the ISBN and cover will not be the same. The book description will sometimes list the ISBN number of the US equivalent, othertimes it will not, and you will not have a written gaurentee that the book is exactly what you need. The important things to look for are that the Title of the book is the same, the Author(s) are the same, and the language of the book is in English.
It will take some hunting to find your books, but hopefully you can save a lot of your hard earned money!