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Where does one professor get off ordering 11 BOOKS for one class? I spent over $600 on books this semester! I am so freaking upset right now at this. In this economy, and in any economy there is no need to 1) order that many books for one class, and 2) jack up the prices of the books. What made me even more angry was that these books aren't available online, I checked.
And why the heck do math and science books cost so much money? What makes them different than any other book that they need to cost $130 a book??? There is no need.
Sorry... I needed to vent because that is a lot of money and we only take out enough in school loans to pay for my semester and we pay for books on our own.

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Re: Furious
It is a pain to have to spend that much on books. 11 seems like a lot if they are all text books.
Unfortunately I think I paid about that much or more every semester of college. Science books are definitely expensive. I wish it wasn't so much, hopefully they actually use the books though if they assign them. I know a lot of people who are no longer buying the books because of too many instances where the profs don't really utilize them.
Have you tried half.com for cheaper books? Or you could try to sell after the class to recoup some of the money. I've had good success selling there. GL!
I think science and math books are more expensive because they have a lower circulation (not like 5 million copies of Harry Potter) and they usually have photos, figures, tables not just text. And a lot goes into writing them.
Definitely resell on Half to get some money back, you will get more than reselling back to the school bookstore.
Have you tried the Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg? They have lots of textbooks.
http://www.midtownscholar.com/
They aren't all math and science, two were math and science and they were $130 each. The 11 books were for my teaching literacy class.
I can't really see the low circulation thing because I think most textbooks have a lot that go into them, amd most of mine have graphs, charts, pictures, etc, but they aren't $130 each.
Does the library of your school carry the book that you could copy them and return yours?
Where I went they Library did have copies of all the books. I also ask the professors if we are actaully going to use the books or whether they are for our own personal reference. For all the clases I've taken I've only really needed the books twice. The others, I never even cracked the entire sememster and was n the Dean's list the whole time.
It's definitely frustrating. I think I spent that much every semester and one of my gen ed history classes we needed something like 7 books and didn't even use all of them. I always ended up with the profs that would want us to get the new edition so I rarely was able to get used.
I think in the sciences (especially anything medical related) its really bad. I remember my exercise physiology book was like $70 or $80 and that was 12 years ago (yikes that makes me sound old!)
Can you at least sell them after the semester to maybe recoup some of the money?
I hated when that happened in undergrad (my master's program doesn't require any extra texts, woohoo!!!). I remember semesters that totalled upwards of $500 for the books and I'd turn around at the end of the semester and get MAYBE $100 for all of it. Ugh.
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