Save Money on Your Textbooks

How to Save Money on Your Textbooks:

1. Cuesta bookstore puts out its list of textbooks, available in the bookstore or the library checkout desk on both San Luis and North County campuses. Order textbooks as soon as possible. Make sure you have the correct edition/ISBN. (Most classes use the same text as last year, but if the text is more than a couple of years old, there could be a new edition.) A few teachers will accept the previous edition, such as the nutrition and human biology teachers at North County. If you are taking Math 7, the instructors are asking you to purchase the eighth edition of Fundamentals of Mathematics instead of the ninth, which means students are scrounging at Aida's or online to get it.
2. Check http://www.addall.com/ or http://www.bookfinder4u.com/ for the textbook. Often you will find instructor’s editions for really cheap, which usually is fine. The ISBN won’t be the same as the student’s edition, but that is OK.
3. Shipping times vary, but normally the book will arrive in 1-2 weeks. If that isn’t soon enough for the class, both the San Luis and North County libraries have copies of the most-used textbooks on reserve for two hour use in the library. You can check to see if the library has a copy at webcat.cuesta.edu/uhtbin/webcat. If that won’t work for you, you can also purchase texts at Aida’s in San Luis Obispo, which will normally be a little bit cheaper (not much, though) than the prices at the Cuesta bookstore.
4. This will not work if you need to purchase a bundled textbook with CD, login code for textbook website, etc. You have to pay retail price for that. The Cuesta bookstore textbook list will indicate if you must purchase a bundled textbook.

[This is a rerun of a posting I made back in December, when it was book-buying time]

Tina Lau, North County Librarian
(in Money, WWW Resources)