I remember awhile ago someone posted a website where you can download school textbooks. I don't feel like paying $600 for books this semester so I was kind of hoping someone would know where I could download books or get them for super cheap.

a good trick, if the bookstore allows it, is to buy books, photocopy them(or actually read them if you're ambitious enough) and then just return them and get your money back. i'd imagine most universities have this as a contingency plan for students who drop a class early on. mine did, and would give full cash back for the books. this doesn't always work like with monster textbooks that don't scan well, and sometimes it'll actually cost more to photocopy an entire book than it would to just buy the damn thing, but it can be a good way to save money. sometimes i had it when a class was completely finished with a book early, so was able to completely finish with it before the trade back deadline.

also, it may be pretty obvious but don't forget about amazon and ebay. both are really flooded with cheap books, and i've seen people pick up $150 textbooks for $15.

just borrow some from the library or nearest restroom (toilet paper)

edit: nevermind it's evidently back up

http://www.textbooktorrents.com/

textbooktorrents doesn't have any downloads on it anymore fyi.



I've used www.bigwords.com for the past year and love it. It's basically a huge book search engine that looks through tons of cheap book websites and gives you the absolutely cheapest deals possible. I've probably saved about $800 dollars over 3 semesters on textbooks. They give you the option to rent textbooks from sites like chegg.com, or get international paperback editions (highly recommended if you dont care about color pages) for really cheap. If you don't like any of their offers you can click "Ignore" and they'll give you the next best. They also find coupons for you to make things cheaper. It's great.


edit: Finding ebook downloads is really difficult. I don't know of any reliable site for book downloads, other than maybe http://www.ebooksbay.org/, which isn't very good. I'd recommend just googling "Book name author rapidshare" or "Book name author pdf" and look through the first 8-10 pages of results. Unless your book is some immensely popular textbook, you will probably not find anything. Probably common sense, but older editions of textbooks are 3x easier to find and download.

edit2: Note about international editions: If you choose to take this route, understand that your textbook may take 2+ weeks to get here. You also can't return it at your college bookstore, but they ARE ~70-90% off the retail price.

Why are they so expensive by the way?

this is where I got my books from>>>


http://www.addebook.com/tech/     <<< the sciences and mathematics / engineering books
http://www.addebook.com/biomed/ <<< food nutrition / biology related / pharmacy / medicine
I dont know what program you're in but if you ask for specific books I might be able to help.

The thing I don't like about this website is that it doesn't have an actual homepage that lets you choose categories. instead its a search bar. but If you like that then go for it.  >>>

http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=009709115718682107475:ghnq3pk3mmy

Why are they so expensive by the way?

they're big and annoying to produce, the number of people that buy them is limited, and they're near worthless in a couple years

lol what. college textbooks probably sell more each year than most bestsellers

I've heard that books have actually increased in price when chosen to be used for teaching.

it's all a scam basically

you can write your texbooks off on your taxes so there's a way to get that money back

I like how hard it is to get these things though

or books in general on the internet

I mean I figured it'd be in less demand than music porn games but at least books can be USEFUL like with textbooks

I guess you can find a torrent of C++ book etc. pretty easily right? so nerd shit at least

you can write your texbooks off on your taxes so there's a way to get that money back

whoah what

lol what. college textbooks probably sell more each year than most bestsellers

i don't know the numbers but i really really doubt this. the potential audience is really narrow,
college kids > kids in a particular subject > kids in a class that use that particular text book > kids that are going to buy the text book

and a textbook has a lifespan of like 3 years. i think you'd be really hard pressed to find a textbook that sells more than 100,000 copies a year, and even if they do it'll only happen for 3 years max. i don't know though, this is just my reasoning