College textbooks can be a huge financial burden for the average student. It is tough to pay for housing, food, and textbooks, and still have money for anything fun left over. The textbooks you need will always be a drain on your wallet, but they don’t have to leave as big a dent in it as they currently do. There are several different ways to save on college textbooks and make life easier for yourself. You just have to know where to look. Your school’s options may be useful, but are not the only ones that are available to you. 

Because the financial struggles of college students are so widespread, many people and institutions have developed ways to give students access to discounted textbooks. If you want to leave college without going completely broke, it is best to take advantage of all the resources available to you. These resources can be easily missed when you know of only one avenue to access textbooks. Here are 7 different ways that you can go about saving on college textbooks!

Rent Textbooks

Temporary textbooks are just as useful as permanent ones. 

You will be assigned many different textbooks to read throughout your college career, many of which you will never need again after a single class. In many cases, you may be better off getting textbooks temporarily. It is common for students to sell their textbooks after using them. Once a class is over, and you can no longer see a use for your books, it can be really convenient to simply return them rather than have to spend time on selling them. Renting makes it really easy to get rid of your unneeded textbooks. 

Renting textbooks is often significantly cheaper than buying them. The prices are heavily discounted since you will agree to only hold on to the books for a few months rather than for good. You can rent books from the campus bookstore, and you can also rent them from a number of sources online. 

Websites like Chegg and Amazon offer many textbooks for rent. You can often order a paper version or an online version through these sites. Within several days of your purchase, they offer the chance to return your rentals without paying the rental fee. This option can be very helpful if you find that you have ordered the wrong textbook for your class. 

This LED clip on lamp from OCM will make it easy to read your textbooks under different types of lighting. 

Buy Used Textbooks

A textbook doesn’t have to be brand new. 

A used textbook won’t be shiny and crisp like a new one, but that is not something that is necessary for success in your classes. If you are willing to buy textbooks that have been used by one or several students beforehand, you will save yourself a ton of money. When you get a used textbook, you get to choose just how worn that book will be. When you order a used textbook online, the condition of the book is normally displayed. Oftentimes, the most worn books also are the cheapest. The most pristine books usually cost the most. 

The more you are willing to compromise on a book’s appearance, the more money you are likely to save. But even if a book’s physical appearance is important to you, you can still save a whole lot of money when you buy a used textbook that’s still in good condition. When getting used textbooks, it can largely depend on you just how much you save. Sometimes, buying a used textbook can be even cheaper than renting one. 

And you can still sell a used textbook after you’re done with it. The price of a used textbook can sometimes be so cheap that you might not even feel the need to resell it, but if you do sell it and manage to make close to the amount you paid for it, it will be as if you used a textbook practically for free. 

Buy E-Books

Digital books save tons of space. 

E-books make a great option for several reasons. They are not only cheaper, but also less laborious to travel with. You can access ebooks from your laptop or your phone, so you won’t have to lug around a large textbook while walking around your school’s campus. You can easily pull up the app in your phone and flip to the pages you need. Ebooks usually make navigation really simple with a table of contents you can click through to get to the right chapters. 

Once you get an ebook, you might even find that you prefer it to traditional physical textbooks. It is really convenient to have access to multiple textbooks in one digital space. As long as you have a decent connection to the internet, which you should have at least on campus, you can read through many textbooks without much hassle. 

With an ebook, you can study in all types of unconventional spaces. You can pull up your textbook app to study while out waiting for your company to arrive, while buying a cup of coffee, or even out relaxing in the park. It would be a burden to carry a textbook outside of school, but when you already have textbooks on your phone, you can read through them anywhere you want. 

Buy an Older Edition

Old editions of textbooks can give out just as much information. 

Unless your professor specifically tells you to buy a certain edition, an older one may be the way to go. Older editions are often significantly cheaper than the newest one. The older the edition, the cheaper it is. It can be helpful for you to look into the differences between the new and older editions. Sometimes not much actually changes between editions. If the changes were not significant enough to render the older versions less useful, an older version will save you a lot of money. 

Most times, the main issue that you will have with an older edition is that the page numbers will be different. You will have to be ready to search for your equivalent page numbers when your professor assigns reading. It is usually not much of a hassle. It is often easy to find the corresponding pages of an older edition. You can always check the table of contents or even the index if you run into any issues. 

Sometimes you can even get an older edition practically for free. After a book is no longer being printed, the creators don’t place as much value on it as they do the newly released one, and can end up giving away content for ridiculously cheap prices. And since they are less desirable, old editions are often sold for practically nothing by the owners. They are sometimes even given away for free. This normally applies to the oldest of editions. If you are just one or even two editions away, you will pay a higher price than when you go even further away from that. The further back you go, the more changes you will likely find compared to the most recent version. You just have to make sure that you can still get what you need out of it. 

Check the Library

The library serves many different purposes. 

Your school’s library likely has some of the textbooks you need for your classes. It won’t have all of them, especially the newest editions, but it is definitely a great idea to check. You can borrow a textbook from the library for several weeks at a time, and often libraries will let you extend your time with a book. You might not be able to keep it for the whole semester, but it will be more than useful to keep a free textbook for any length of time. 

If you are good at taking notes, you can get a lot of use from a textbook in just a few weeks. And sometimes a few weeks is all that you might need to study for a major exam. You can easily make the most out of possessing a temporary textbook for free. When going with this method of saving, you will need to get another textbook to make it through the rest of the semester. If no one claims a book that you return, you can always check it out again. But renting a textbook from the library can be a way to save money in the meantime before you have to make the plunge and spend money on a textbook. 

Some professors assign different books for different portions of the semester, which means that you can have a free library book for just as long as you need it. If you can make it to the library early on, you will have much better chances at finding the books you need. Other students with significant savings in mind may also be looking to search for the textbooks they need, and they are making sure to do it as soon as possible. 

Share with Classmates

Your classmates can make school a lot easier. 

Sharing with your classmates is a great way to go about saving money on books. If you know of someone who has already taken a similar course, you can ask them if they still have the book. They may be willing to give it away for free, or to sell it to you at a lower price than you will find in bookstores. If you are struggling with cash at the moment, friends and classmates may be willing to lend you their textbooks whenever they aren’t using them. You can easily pass the books back and forth to each other wherever you go to class or elsewhere around campus. 

It could even be a good idea to pair up with a student in your field of study to split the cost of textbooks. You can each contribute half to get a textbook and then pass it back and forth to each other. You can do that with any of the classes you have in common. If you end up taking the same classes at different times, you can purchase a textbook and then have your classmate pay half the price to use it when it’s their turn, and vice versa. And if you buy your books used, that makes for double the savings. You can save even more substantially if you can manage to have this kind of system set up with a study group. 

Use the Open Education Network

Some schools offer students extra benefits. 

The Open Education Network is a student textbook service that isn’t very well known. This network provides an online library of textbooks that students can use. More than 600 colleges in the country are a part of this network, which gives their students access to this amazing opportunity for saving money. The textbooks on this site are free and openly licensed. They are complete versions of textbooks that are allowed to be shared on this platform for free. 

Professors are able to plan their coursework based on the textbooks available in the network. Students are then allowed to use their student email addresses and a URL from their professor to log in to the network. It even offers many benefits on top of the free textbook material. The network includes instructional support, slide decks, and data collection tools. If your university is not already a member of the Open Education Network, you can talk to faculty members about entering the application process. 

College textbooks are known to be really expensive, but you can get around this if you know where to look. Studying shouldn’t leave you completely broke, and when you know the right resources to use, you can make sure that it doesn’t.