Which college textbooks should i keep

If, however, you've decided to rent all your books, you can simply rent the newer edition for the next term. If you live on campus, transporting your textbooks home over the summer or finding a place to store them can be a hassle. They're heavy and bulky and take up a lot of space — especially in a small dorm room. But if you rent your books each year, you can simply return them at the end of the term without having to pack them away.

You need to remember to return your books by a particular deadline. If you return them late, you will be charged a fee. Mark down due dates in your calendar to avoid unnecessary expenses. Similar to buying used books, if you're renting your textbooks from an online dealer, you might be unpleasantly surprised by the condition of your books when you get them.

Stray notes and highlighting may be distracting for some learners. Additionally, a rental company might try and charge you for damage to a book you didn't cause. Read the fine print on rental agreements carefully. Many textbooks feature supplemental information, such as access codes for online lesson plans and coursework. Rented books, however, may not contain this information, or rental companies may charge extra for these materials, which can drive up the price. Students have many options for renting their textbooks, from campus bookstores to e-commerce sites.

How awesome is that? No need to fumble around with the lamp, etc. That said, most of my ebooks are pirated and are limited to specific niche topics - my collection of ebooks doesn't even begin to rival my physical library in breadth. Maybe eventually, but we'll see No, I kept almost all of them.

I bet that out of maybe 40 textbooks, I've used maybe 4 - all programming-related Programming Pearls, Numerical Recipes, some algorithm texts. I also have hundreds of non-textbooks sitting in boxes now. Doing it all over again today with what's available online, I'd get rid of almost every book after I was done with it.

They are so easy to replace that it's not worth the hassle and storage. I once pointed out, to a former grad school roommate, a big fat general relativity textbook sitting on my bookshelf.

I said that even though I didn't use it any more and had forgotten its contents, it was hard for me to throw it out. I've gotten rid of most of my textbooks, but I still retain a sampling for sentimental reasons. I'm still kicking myself for selling back my freshman year psychology textbook long before I had any idea that I would eventually be a psychology major because it was such a good textbook and in hindsight, it would be worth more to me now than the money I got for selling it.

For example, I don't want to sell back my experimental psychology textbook before I take research methods, seeing as "Research Methods" is the title of the book. And of course my APA style guide isn't going anywhere any time soon. I transferring to a university this fall and I am going to eventually take all the upper division versions of the classes I took in CC and I'll most likely keep those. So it's a nice change :P.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Here are 3 reasons why you should hang on to your college textbooks. You need to use your college textbook as a reference.