Think your NUS card is the only weapon you’ve got in your arsenal to get money off the books you need for your degree? Think again. Savvy student are beginning to cotton on to a whole host of other ways to buy the cheapest textbooks they possibly can. Some are even finding ways to download university text books online. Not only this, they’re discovering auction-style websites where they can sell unwanted second hand university books online too. So, they’re saving cash on their new reading lists and making some extra dosh off their new old ones.

Save money; buy second hand textbooks online

Your university course reading list; you can guarantee you’ll get a new one each semester. Buying the books on it you need to finish your courses constitute a regular and continual drain on your student budget. So, it makes great sense to minimise your financial outlay by buying second hand text books.

The challenge of course, is finding someone who’s actually got a copy of the book you want for sale. The most obvious people to speak to are those in the years above doing similar courses to you at your uni. The problem here is that you’ve got to find out who they are first. Now, you could put an ad on the course notice board or ask your lecturers to help you out. However, once you’ve found someone who owns the book you’re after, there’s no guarantee they’ll be willing to sell it to you.

There is a way you can hedge your bets and improve your chances of finding a seller: buy second hand text books online. This way you can search for books owned by students and graduates across the UK, not just at your university. It’s likely someone reading Mathematics at The University of Leeds will have had a similar reading list to one studying at The University of Manchester. The internet can help connect countless buyers and sellers to one another; eBay being the case-in-point.

Save even more money; download university textbooks for free

Students in Europe and the USA have been downloading books for free for a while now. It’s a trend that’s becoming more and more popular amongst students here in the UK. From accounting and economics to finance and mechanical engineering, you can find a textbook written by leading academics on most subjects – if you know where to look. So what’s the catch? How come you can download university textbooks for free when it costs money to buy them from a shop? The reason why you can is simple: advertising. Websites can offer a no cost service because they make their money through selling advertising space. So, if you download a book and every ten pages you seen ad for a bank or fast-food chain; remember they’ve paid for your freebie!

Make money; sell second hand university books online

The thing is with textbooks is that once you’ve read and learnt from them, they just sit there on your shelf gathering dust. There’s a simple way to turn your second hand books into some extra cash: money you can spend on uni-life’s essentials such as food and drink. All you’ve got to do is find a buyer. The best place to start looking for customers is in the years below. It’s likely that they have the same books on their reading lists as you did when you were in their year. However, there’s no guarantee that they’ll want to buy your cheap college books. So to maximise your chances of making a sale, it’s best to advertise online. There’s already a thriving online UK student discounts community. It’s all about knowing the best way to reach it.

How to buy, sell and download textbooks

From internet book stores to auction sites, there are plenty of places where you can buy and sell secondhand University textbooks online. However, there’s only one site where you can do both plus download books for free. Please see the links below for further information.

Source by Paul G Tom