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!