The Price is Right

Attending college at a public university like Sam Houston State University during the 2005-2006 school year will cost an average student $5,416 per semester, according to College Board's 2005 report on college pricing. The tuition at Sam Houston is significantly lower than the national average at around $2,430 for 15 hours, but students here and others at colleges and universities across the country are fighting the same battle against the high prices of textbooks.

As students are beginning to feel the pinch in their wallets with tuition increases, and as gas prices continue to rise, many have discovered that buying their textbooks online puts more money back into their wallets.

Buying textbooks online is starting to become more appealing to students who traditionally buy their textbooks from bookstores around Huntsville. Valerie Bella, junior at SHSU, hasn't had the chance to try online book shopping.

"I've been hearing from all of my friends how much cheaper it is to buy your books online, and that's what really drives me to want to try it next semester," Bell said.

She said that many of her friends have used a Web site called Cheapbooks.com because it compares the prices of many major online bookstores to help you find the cheapest price. The site compares prices from Amazon.com, EBay's Half.com, Barnes & Nobel.com, Overstock.com, as well as other stores like Ecampus.com and BiggerBooks.com.

Some of comparative book buying Web sites like Cheapbooks.com, Bigwords.com and Directtextbook.com take prices from a variety of stores and compare their prices. They often compare college bookstore prices from ecampus.com, Barnes & Nobel or other major bookstore providers to online book auction sites like Amazon or EBay. These sites are the middle men to helping students locate great deals.

Some students buy their books online because they can't find their books here in Huntsville. Junior Christy Hernandez said that she had to buy her statistics book online at Amazon.com this past semester because none of the local bookstores carried it.

Hernandez said she's purchased books before using Cheapbooks.com but used Amazon.com this past semester because she felt more comfortable and safe using the site.

"The hardest part about buying your books online is that you have to trust the company with your personal information," Hernandez said.

With other Web sites, Hernandez said that you're not exactly sure whether or not they're secure. Sometimes you're uncomfortable giving away your personal information she said.

Hernandez admitted that sometimes you can find cheaper books on other Web sites other than Amazon, but she said that she knows that the site is secure.

Half.com and Amazon.com have an online forum for buying textbooks that gives buyers the capability to purchase textbooks through other people who have listed their products on the site. Both sites allow a buyer to browse the site, compare the price and condition of each textbook while looking at the reliability of a seller.

Finding textbooks online on the majority of these Web sites is done through the ISBN number on the back of all textbooks. While you can search for the title or author of a book, Half.com suggests on its site that each textbook buyer should have the ISBN number of each textbook they need for their classes. This ensures that the books students buy are the exact texts that their professor requires. Without the ISBN number, the company warns that a student could accidentally order the wrong edition of a book.

The first step into finding the ISBN number is finding out what books are needed for each class. On the SHSU Web site, a student can find a list of the books required for their classes under the SamWeb menu. Clicking on "book list" under SamWeb, a student can type in their class identification number and a list of the books they need, including the ISBN number, will be listed for each particular class.

Doing a Google search online for "textbooks" will also reveal a variety of choices in which Web sites are available to buy textbooks from. Some students, like Christy Hernandez, are more comfortable with certain sites because they are familiar with them and are used to doing business with them. Valerie Bell and others like herself are hoping to try and find their perfect textbook site, but for now, Bell hopes purchasing her textbooks online may help lead to a solution to the bigger problem.

"If more people start buying books from the Internet, than maybe local book stores will be forced to lower their prices," Bell said.