A lot of college students complain about expensive books etc. Tonight I'm gonna show you my trick of buying books at extremely low 'net' prices. It's quiet simple actually - buy low, sell high :) I buy all my college books (used/2nd-hand) cheaply from Amazon and after I use them for 4-5 months, I sell them at a decently high price on Half.com. If you have ever taken an introductory course to Economics, you might remember that in a perfect market system, the price of similar goods is same everywhere. So if somebody's selling a book on Amazon for $15, the sellers on Half.com also have the similar price. However, what most people don't realize is the difference in the markets. Amazon is the cheapest place for used books. Half.com is owned by eBay and is the bookstore for people who use eBay a lot.

Now most people who use eBay, use it as the sole online store - they don't buy from anywhere else - that is how much they are addicted to eBay. Since more people use Amazon, the prices of used books are obviously lower there. So I buy my books from there. And since eBayers don't really care if some book is $10 cheaper on Amazon (or maybe they don't even know there exists an internet beyond eBay), they are willing to pay a higher price for the same book. So I bought my Math book for $45 few months ago from Amazon, used it for my class, and then sold it on Half for $55. That's $10 for USING a book (less $2-3 shipping).

This is not a good business scheme, cuz it takes a while to setup online accounts, go to the post-office to ship the books and to wait for the books etc. So even though I discovered a way to make a little profit, it's not good enough to pay my rent. However, it's a great cost-saving plan. In the last 2 years, I've spent at most $100 net total on books, whereas almost everyone I know spends $300-400 PER semester. So there you go. This is how to save some good money.

One important thing to remember is not to buy the cheapest book, but one that you can sell at a higher price. If the book is real cheap but in bad condition, it's possible nobody's gonna buy it. So it's better to buy a $100 book and sell it for $90 than buy a $25 book and not be able to sell it at all. Oh as a final show-off note, I actually made $40 or something on my Calculus books, that I used for 3 semesters (1.5 yrs!). How? I bought it from another student for a real low price and sold it on Half.com.

Add a Comment