Turk For Your Textbooks! Why I'm refusing to pay out-of-pocket for my textbooks!

Anybody who's a friend of mine on Facebook may have noticed that last night I linked to this story about the ridiculous cost of textbooks. I returned to school a couple of years ago to get my nursing degree, and I know that I'm not alone. When the economy is in decline, school enrollment goes up because people look to train for more lucrative careers or to enhance their current careers by developing new skills. But some textbooks are $200 and $300 a piece, and the price goes up every few years with each new edition. When you try to sell your books back (if that's even an option, depending on where you are). So are you going to decide not to go back to school? Of course not! Going back to school is a great decision for you and (if you have one) your family. So here are some tips for getting what you need on the cheap.

You can support your fellow students by trying to find one who's already taken the class and buying their used textbook. I try to skip this option just because the price is not usually going to be the best one I can find. But it's a good option if you want to support a friend, or if you don't like to mail order.

When I look for textbooks, I start at Amazon. And unless you are studying a field that has frequent and rapid changes (like technology, computers, etc.), you can most likely use an older edition. Think about what you're studying. If you're studying sciences, the information is most likely the same since the last edition was printed. Unless it's a very recent history class, history has not changed since the last edition was printed. If you're comfortable using an old edition, by all means do it. Arguably the most difficult course in my curriculum is Human Physiology and I used a ninth edition textbook instead of buying the thirteenth edition. I looked at my friends' textbooks and a lot of the sentences were still the same, and the information was the same. Old editions are just fine for me! You will save lots of money using old editions. Here's an example:

This was my anatomy and physiology textbook. When I was in this class, they were still using the red textbook but they have since come out with the black one. If you compare the prices, you will save $74 renting the old edition versus the new edition. Believe it or not, you will actually save more if you buy yourself a copy of the old edition! Renting the old edition is $21.75; buying your own copy of the old edition is $8.55! So if you buy an old copy of the textbook instead of renting the new one, you will save $87.20! Do you think humans grew any new organs or worked much differently between 2008 and 2011? Probably not.

Now, again, this will not work for every class. I don't recommend using a really old edition (over 5 years or so) unless you're completely strapped. And if you have math problems or chemistry problems to turn in, don't do this unless you can confirm with a friend or another student that the problems are the same from edition to edition. Which leads me to option #2...

Check to see if the school library has the title on reserve and/or available for checkout. If you are someone who mostly studies from lectures and lecture notes and only uses the book for reference or to check facts, this may be a good option for you because you won't have to pay anything to take advantage of this. However, these are limited resources because if the book is already checked out you're out of luck, and if it isn't, books on reserve can't be removed from the library and can only be checked out for an hour or two at a time. If you sit there and make photocopies of everything, it will end up costing more than what it's worth. This option won't work for me most of the time but if you're in a pinch and you take great notes, go for it.

If you live in an area with lots of schools that offer your program (like I do), sometimes you can find your textbooks for free or on the cheap on craigslist or freecycle. I have found three required texts for my program for free doing this! If you're on freecycle, you can post a "seek" for old textbooks and you might be lucky enough to find someone willing to part with what you need.

If you're just looking for some good free reference information for papers and research, give Google Books a try. Publishers will add pages of their books to Google Books for consumers to preview them and decide if they want to buy them. The books on there are usually not complete books so I wouldn't depend on them if you think that you need to have access to the whole book. But if you're looking for information you might be able to find what you need there.

But what I'm doing is even better than all that.

If you haven't heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk, by all means go check it out. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a website that allows individuals and companies to post "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs) - stuff like surveys and transcription - that you can do to earn money. The money then goes into your Amazon Payments account, and you can apply it to anything you buy from Amazon. Cool, huh? So you can actually work off your textbooks by doing tasks in your spare time. If you use the tip above about buying used old editions, you won't have to do much of that at all. If you like doing HITs, you can keep doing them and just transfer the money into your banking account for a little extra scratch.

Speaking of extra scratch, one of my future posts will be about all my "hustles" to get extra money in my pocket. If this post was helpful, you won't want to miss it. In the meanwhile, good luck on finals and turk on!

Dance 10, Looks 3: A flavor-focused reflection on my ugly-yet-delicious food.

There are lots of reasons why I don't blog a lot.

Number one, of course, is that I'm in nursing school full-time and I work part-time. It's a huge commitment of my life that will eventually be more than just a labor of love.

But while I was making dinner tonight, I thought about all the reasons why I don't blog about my food more often. There are blogs I've been meaning to do, like about how I make iced coffee at home (and if you're not doing it, you should) and these really yummy ginger-berry popsicles I made a while back. Sometimes it's because my kitchen is not ready for prime time and is too dirty for me to take pictures in it.

I'm also someone who's really bad at making recipes because I enjoy cooking as an organic process. I have great recipe concepts - like my legendary fried catfish or shrimp grits - but I almost never make things the same way twice because I can always think of something else to do to change it up and potentially make it better.

And sometimes, my food is downright ugly.

I suck at visual presentation as a whole (I guess it's good that I married a graphic designer) in pretty much every aspect of my life. I hate dressing up and doing my hair. I have zero interest in decorating. The day you catch me buying curtains is the day I caught someone looking at me in the window earlier that morning. So when I put up a picture of my food, I've usually come up with something that - for me - is an attractive dish. But for every attractive dish I put up a picture of, I've made five to ten things that were way more delicious and far less attractive.

Say I were to tell you that when I came home from work tonight, my dinner was a Mediterranean Tuna Salad Wrap with fresh cucumber and cream cheese. Sounds delicious, right? Yeah, well, it was. It was pretty bangin'. And I ask if you want one too, and you get pretty excited and say, "Sure, make me one." And then I bring you this:

Yep. Ugly.

Part of my failure with tasty but ugly food is idea versus execution. This wrap had great contents but the filling busted out of that wimpy Joseph's lavash wrap. (To be fair, those things are really tasty and excellent for you, and they make awesome thin-crust pizzas. They just suck at wraps. I keep being optimistic, and then disappointed.) But to be fair, I'll tell you what I did.

I started thinking about a plain cucumber and cream cheese sandwich, or maybe spreading cream cheese on cucumber slices and just eating it like that. And then I remembered seeing a pin about hollowing out a cucumber and stuffing a meat salad in to make a carb-free "sandwich." I came home and got the cucumber and the cream cheese out of the refrigerator, and then I looked at it and remembered how much I like dill weed, and told myself, "This could be way better." So I took a bath first and thought it through a little bit before heading to the kitchen. (By the by, I put dill on A LOT of food, and nary a meat or egg salad in my house goes without it. It may be my favorite herb.)

So I come back to the kitchen, and I make the tuna salad. Because I'm using cream cheese, I use olive oil as the fatty element. I'm not a big fan of mayonnaise to begin with - I either use olive oil for good fats, or plain yogurt for lean protein. A teacher told me about the yogurt in 1996 and I never stopped. I put a buttload of dill in there, some lemon pepper, and the other usual suspects, and let it sit while I spread the cream cheese on the lavash, and then cut thin slices of cucumber and put it on the wrap. Then I dumped the tuna salad onto the cucumbers and attempted to roll it. I may as well have rolled it in tissue paper.

But it was delicious, and pretty much exactly what I wanted for dinner.

So celebrate your ugly-tasty concoctions.