I remember the first time I looked at my university’s online bookstore. When I saw the price tags, my head spun. How on earth could textbooks cost so much? I wondered if there was any way possible that I could save money on textbooks.

I researched a lot and asked friends for recommendations, and it wasn’t long before I discovered a few ways to save money on textbooks. Hallelujah!

I started college in the fall of 2014 and graduated in December 2017. I had seven semester-worths of books to buy during that time, plus one summer when I took summer classes.

So over those seven semesters, I used the tips that I’m going to share with you today. These tips saved me so much money over time and made buying textbooks way less depressing. :)

Here are my top three tips for how to save money on textbooks:

This post includes affiliate links. You can see my disclosure page here; thanks for your support!

1. Slugbooks

My boyfriend’s brother told me about Slugbooks before I started college and I’m so grateful he did! Using Slugbooks over my 3.5 years of college saved me hundreds of dollars on textbooks- not kidding!

Okay, so what is Slugbooks?

Slugbooks.com is a website where you can type in a textbook’s ISBN number and then it shows you how much that book costs at Amazon, AbeBooks, Barns & Noble, Amazon Rental, Chegg, Valore Book Rentals, and more!

This is fantastic because you can easily price check at a variety of places without having to go to those individual websites.

I wrote a whole tutorial about how to use Slugbooks in case you’d like to see how it works.

It’s easily the best way to save money on textbooks.

2. Rent, don’t buy (if at all possible)

Renting textbooks is far cheaper than buying them (even if you buy used). When I was a freshman, I was really nervous to rent textbooks online… so I bought all of them.

Big mistake.

For one, there was no need for me to buy the textbook because, with the exception of a few books for my major, I never looked at those textbooks again.

And, textbook companies constantly come out with new editions, so I couldn’t even re-sell my textbooks later. (Boo!)

Most importantly- I spent more money that year on textbooks than I did any other year at college. Sophomore year I decided to try out rentals and I never looked back!

If you want to save money on textbooks- rent, rent, rent!

On Slugbooks you can easily compare the prices to buy and the prices to rent:

Unless your textbook comes with an online code that your professor wants (those usually only come with a new textbook), I highly recommend you rent your textbooks.

I have rented with Amazon Rentals, Chegg, and ValoreBooks Rental and haven’t had issues with any of them. Each service emails you about a month before your textbooks are due back to remind you of the due date and to give you information on how to ship them. They also provide a shipping label for you.

Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. :)

(Helpful hint: Add the due date to your planner, calendar app, or reminders app so you don’t forget to ship them!)

3. Use Amazon Prime Shipping

If you chose to shop on Amazon for any of your textbooks, use Amazon Prime when possible! Amazon Prime provides you with FREE two-day shipping!

This is awesome for two reasons:

1. Free shipping is great in helping save a few extra bucks.
2. Two-day shipping is fantastic when you forget to buy textbooks before class starts and you desperately need the book to get to you soon. (Not that I’ve ever done that…)

In the picture above you’ll see that I used Amazon’s filter feature to only look at books with free Prime shipping. The first options that come up are rentals, followed by used books.

If you don’t have Amazon Prime yet, you definitely need to check out Amazon Prime Student

Amazon Prime Student is basically the same thing as Amazon Prime… but better! Instead of getting a free thirty-day trial when you sign up with Amazon Prime if you sign up with Amazon Student you get a free six-month trial!

If you time it right, you could order textbooks in the fall with Amazon Student and then order again for the spring semester within that six-month trial period!

I signed up for Prime Student when I was an incoming freshman and planned to cancel it before the trial ran out… except I fell in love with Amazon Prime and wanted it to continue!

Some of the benefits of Prime Student:

• Free two-day shipping
• Amazon Prime Video (like Netflix, but with different shows/ movies)
• College deals and exclusive promotions
• Free, unlimited photo storage (so you can keep your college memories without using all the space on your phone)
• Amazon Music (like Pandora or Spotify, but without adds)

And, if you’re like me and end up LOVING Amazon Prime Student, you can keep your subscription to Prime for 50% off the normal cost of Amazon Prime. Say what?!?

But, if you don’t end up loving it, you can cancel anytime.

I encourage you to give it a try though. At least try it long enough to get free shipping on this semester’s textbooks ;)

You can learn more about Prime Student and get your free trial here!

Quick Recap:

Alright, so my 3 tips for how to save money on textbooks are…

1. Use Slugbooks
2. Rent, Don’t Buy
3. Use Amazon Prime Student to get Free Shipping

That’s it for today :) Happy savings!

If you know of any other ways to save money on textbooks, please share in the comments so you can help other college students! :)

Posted by Kara Beth & filed under College. This post has 3 comments.