Buying textbooks is an absolute, total pain, and we all know it. If you ask me, they are overprescribed, overpriced, and for some of us, nearly impossible to get.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I had seven required books this semester, and at least four of them cost around $100 a piece to either rent or buy from the Moravian Bookstore. The others ranged from $20-$60 each.
Unfortunately, the money tree I planted in my yard over the summer has yet to bloom, so there was no way I was going to pay those prices. So, of course, I turned to my trusty friend Google, and over the course of the next week, I acquired all of my necessary textbooks at much lower prices and nearly gave my credit card information to some foreign dude on a shady site.
Anyway, I lived to tell the tale, and I’m here now to share a little of what I have learned, a lot of complaints, and a few tidbits of advice.
The second I saw the prices the Moravian Bookstore had posted for the books I needed, I almost cried (but I didn’t, so let’s count that as a win).
Textbook prices are absolutely ridiculous, and the prices assigned to them by publishers just look like money grabs. Publishers often have near monopolies on the textbook market, with there being very little competition between textbooks in general, meaning that the publishers can charge a crazy high price knowing that most people will have no choice but to buy them.
Additionally, publishers send out “new” editions of textbooks all the time. More often than not, these “new editions” look much like the originals, with very menial things being changed. Despite this, the textbook is considered to be “new” and “updated,” meaning publishers can continue to charge what they want.
However, while the publishing companies shoulder much of the blame for the large price tag assigned to these books, professors who assign them are partially to blame, too.
A lot of the time, professors will require students to have the latest edition of the textbook, even though the material in them doesn’t usually vary too drastically from edition to edition. Older editions are much cheaper and affordable, meaning that for people struggling to afford textbooks, they are a great alternative.
Some professors are very understanding of these facts, but I’ve heard stories from people here at Moravian saying that their professor would not allow them to use an older edition of a textbook in class. Additionally, college bookstores (like the Moravian Bookstore) oftentimes only have the latest edition of the textbook, so if you are allowed to use an older version, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
In general, one of the easiest ways for you to save money purchasing your textbook is to not get it from the Moravian Bookstore. After surveying a few different online shops, I found that the Bookstore almost always charges the highest price for any given textbook.
Renting from the Bookstore is also pretty expensive at times. For the one textbook I needed, Moravian was charging about $98 to rent it, and about $105 to buy it. Not a deal. The Bookstore does list a slightly discounted price to rent a used textbook, but they often do not have used textbooks in stock, meaning you will probably get stuck paying for a new one anyway.
All of this combined, along with the fact that there are few ways to get a discount at the Moravian Bookstore when purchasing textbooks, means that buying or renting from the school is just not an affordable option for many students, especially when you need multiple books.
So, where do we turn? Amazon carries a lot of textbooks at prices a little lower than the Moravian Bookstore, but they can still be pretty pricey. Buying used textbooks can help drop the price some more, so checking out eBay, ThriftBooks.com, or AbeBooks.com can be useful, especially if you are allowed to use an older edition. Once you’re done with your textbook, you can try to resell it again on these sites too.
Sometimes, though, finding a cheap physical copy of the textbook can be impossible, which is where things can get kind of dangerous if you wish to proceed in your quest for affordable prices. You can find sites selling PDF versions of textbooks for between $15-$20, but the PDFs were likely copied illegally. Buyer beware.
All of this to say, finding and affording textbooks can be a huge struggle, and while there are some workarounds and tricks to possibly find a lower price than the abhorrent ones listed by the publisher (and the Moravian Bookstore), these approaches to textbook shopping can be time-consuming, possibly risky, and sometimes illegal.
In the perfect world, we shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get the required materials for classes we already paid a huge sum to be enrolled in. Isn’t equal access to education Moravian’s whole thing? But, I guess until publishing companies decide to quit exploiting students, some of us will just have to make do with our old edition, PDF copy, or library-borrowed textbooks.
