College Textbook Deals on the Web

Have you seen the price of college textbooks lately? If you've got a college kid, you know books have doubled or tripled in cost since you were in college. But the great thing about the web is that it provides college students with more options for buying and selling books than campus bookstores that typically offer no deals.

One of our more entrepreneurial nieces has been selling her used college textbooks online, often turning a profit to replenish her bank account to buy the next semester's round of books. There are several web sites where students are buying and selling textbooks and finding other school-related goods and services, such as computers and tutors.

One of the bigger sites, Chegg.com, recently got $2.2 million in venture capital funding, Business Week reports. The site has grown by acquiring others like it, including UFlipit, Textopedia, and UTank.

Using the site, which is supported by advertising, is free, and shipping is free, too. Here's how it works: To buy a book, you plug in the title, author, keyword and/or ISBN number to find out if it's among the more than 660,000 available on the site. To sell, there's a shorter form requiring the book category and ISBN number.

So instead of college bookstores getting the full profit when it buys back books for about 70 percent or so of the original price, college students can lower the margins and share the profits.

Some other sites where the used-textbook trade is flourishing:

Amazon
Half.com, an ebay site
Collegemedium.com
DormItem