Looking for grad school textbooks - what is the best place to buy online?

I got great prices on Amazon used this semester. One $24 book was 60 cents!

I found two of my books on Amazon also, plus one on Ebay. Also try Abe’s Books, they normally have a good selection.

Just for fun, check out PaperBackSwap.com. They don’t just do paperbacks, but anything with an ISBN, and you never know what someone is trying to get rid of. If you get lucky, it won’t cost you anything.

I get almost all my textbooks from amazon.com and half.com. You might also check to see if your school’s student association has a book marketplace. Mine has a great website where people are always buying and selling books at prices that rival amazon, with the added bonus that you don’t have to pay for shipping, and you can usually meet the person to get the book the same day or the very next day.

You can rent textbooks from chegg.com, I’ve heard it’s usually waaaay cheaper – can’t wait to try it out when I start grad school.

I got a lot of my textbooks from the library. As a grad students we got full quarter checkouts (we were on quarters, not semesters) and so I would check the library first for all my textbooks. University libraries statewide were linked through a pretty easy to use system, so even if our University’s copy was on reserve I could often find one. I’d say I got about a third of my textbooks this way. And it’s free. The only problem was that if someone requested a book you had to return it after the shorter undergrad checkout period. In that case I would just hold on to it until I was able to find another through the library or online. I saved far more than I ever paid in overdue fines.

Also, 10–15 books per class? It’s been too long since your professor’s were students. That’s just cruel and unusual. You probably won’t need most of them, or only need a few pages.

ecampus.com

I use chegg.com, which allows you to rent the textbooks for a semester, quarter, or 60-days. They’ve got all the latest editions, and it’s much cheaper. I had one textbook this quarter that cost $130 at the university bookstore, but was able to rent it from the site for $11.