Saving money on textbooks

I recently found out that my textbooks are only going to cost about $20 this semester.

The entire $20 of my textbook expenditures is from a single course, Studies in the Humanities. Technically, the book I have to buy isn’t even a textbook- it’s a novel that the class is required to read for the exam.

My anatomy course and both of the labs I’m taking don’t use textbooks, since all the material is drawn from the course notes. Although I don’t select courses based on textbook prices (or, in this case, a lack of textbooks), it’s always a nice bonus when things work out this way.

Three of my courses are actually using textbooks I already own. Two of the courses- Human Physiology and a French class- are continuations of courses I took from previous semesters. The third course, a microbiology class, just happens to use the same textbook, which luckily wasn’t part of my end of the year textbook bonfire.

And no, I can’t actually afford to set my textbooks on fire, no matter how terrible the course was. By "end of the year textbook bonfire," I actually mean "sold on AbeBooks."

-Photo courtesy of djfoobarmatt