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With the end of the term looming large and students wrapping up studies and looking for ways to raise cash for summer, now’s the best time to get down to the issue of maximizing textbook-buyback dollars.

It’s no secret that many factors affect the value offered by a bookstore or buyer for any given textbook. Answers to these common questions are taken into account when the establishing buyback value:
  • Is there a new edition of the textbook available or coming soon?
  • Is the book needed because it is being used next term?
  • Does the bookstore or buyer already have enough copies and needs no more?
  • What condition is the book in?
  • Is it complete with supplements like CDs?
With the exception of the last two, answers to these questions are in the hands of publishers, bookstores and buyers, and professors. So other than keeping books in good condition and with any extras, what can students do to get the most money back? Well, it turns out that the answers are:
  1. Educate themselves about the various selling venues (the campus bookstore, online, peer to peer).
  2. Time their selling based on the new data we’ve gathered and published about buyback cycles and values.

You can read our full findings and even download the raw data here, but we’ll give you the condensed version now.

We looked at the 2010 spring buyback period (the five weeks in April and May when most students sell books) and compiled data about 20 indicator ISBNs each time they were searched and an offering price retrieved from online buyers. The results show that timing is of the essence when it comes to maximizing buyback price. Some notable findings:

  • Search volume and average price were opposed: as supply (students selling books) rose, the price offered by buyback companies dropped.
  • The weeks of May 2-8 and 9-15, the peak of the buyback season, saw huge search volume, and at the same time, the lowest average prices.
  • Search volume skyrocketed an average of 300% between April 25-May 1 and May 2-8. During this time, there was an almost universal drop in average prices.
  • The first weeks of buyback have a more consistent price range for each book. Within the peak of buyback, the range becomes extreme, sometimes differing $50+ on the same day.
  • Many more $0 (no-value or not-buying) prices appear during peak as buyers obtain the most stock for the lowest prices.

Conclusion: Ultimately, students can aim for consistent prices early, gamble with the wide range (and lower average price) at peak time, or hold out for the highest (but few available) prices after the rush.

Tips:
  1. Know what your deal means: online buyback quotes can be good for one day or 30 days, and you must read the details to make sure you know what data you are looking at and what “real” value it has.
  2. Understand that many sites requires you to ship the book within a certain number of days after the quote is generated.
  3. Ask the bookstore if the book will be used for the next semester, if they tell you no or they don’t know, then you are most likely getting a wholesale or Internet price. Wholesale books will go back to a central distribution center and are then sold to another school. Internet retail prices are purchased for resale over the internet.  Both are a lower value than a retail book that will stay on your campus and be used the next semester.

To learn more, read the full results of our study.

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At CampusBooks.com, we don’t sell, rent, or buy textbooks; instead, we deliver the information and resources that students and families can use to make the best choices when it comes to saving money on higher-education expenses.

Given that it’s tax season (just one month left until the April 15 deadline), we want to make sure that you’re up to speed on the important benefits available in the name of Tax Incentives for Higher Education. This information could mean up to $2,500 in tax credits for college students and their families. We urge you to do a few easy things to make sure that you get the most money back come tax time.

  1. Visit TextbookAid.org to find out the full details of the American Opportunity Tax Credit (very helpful is this IRS Q&A). If your parents or anyone else is involved in paying for your education, share this information with them.
  2. Know that textbook purchases now qualify as expenses under the program, but to get credit for them, you must have receipts showing your qualified spending. The IRS has expanded the definition of qualified spending to include “expenditures for ‘course materials.’ For this purpose, the term ‘course materials’ means books, supplies, and equipment needed for a course of study whether or not the materials are purchased from the educational institution as a condition of enrollment or attendance.”

Finally, we know that taxes are complicated so here’s a good overview and starting point to help you get the most back for your 2010 education expenses.

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With colleges and universities getting back in session throughout the entire month of January and students scouring the Internet and campus bookstores searching for the best deals on textbooks, we thought we’d take a moment to give you some tips on saving even more money.

Sure, when you use the CampusBooks.com price-comparison tool via website or smartphone, you see an array of the absolute lowest prices on the textbooks you need. But the initial search is just the first step in your savings. Here are some additional ways to compound the textbook savings:

1) Use Coupons: When you conduct your search, you may see something like “Coupon: 10% Off Order — Use Code Save10” in the search results. If you see that a coupon is available, click “See Details” in the listing and copy the code for when you check out on the merchant’s page. A word about textbook coupons: we don’t skimp here and many coupons are exclusive to CampusBooks.com. This month we’ve got coupons from:

  • Alibris
  • Biblio
  • CampusBookRentals
  • CengageBrain
  • Chegg
  • College Book Renter
  • CourseSmart
  • eCampus
  • Half.com
  • PhatCampus
  • TextbookStop
  • Many more!

2) Add multiple books (up to 10) to a single order in your Bookbag and let us find you the best bundled deal. We’ll bring back results showing multi-book discounts and cheaper shipping when you use a single merchant for more than one of the items. To add to a Bookbag and bundle for savings, conduct your search, click the “Compare Prices Now” button, and instead of clicking any of the “Buy Now” button, instead click “+ Bookbag.” We’ll do the rest to maximize your textbook savings.

3) Be open to both buying textbooks and renting textbooks and mixing and matching. Sometimes it makes sense to buy your textbooks, like when you know that you’ll keep them or you need to write in them or they come with some sort of access code or proprietary supplements or you know that the book will have a high buyback value. If these things are not the case, consider renting if the price is substantially lower than purchase price.

4) Consider eBooks and international editions. Maybe you’ve never tried these formats, but they can save you big money. Now is an especially good time for eBooks as there is an abundance of free reader software for computers and smartphones.

5) Because free is the ultimate in savings, use our Local Search to check nearby libraries to see if they have your books available for loan.

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The prep for finals, the all-nighters, the scrambling at the bookstore, the posters saying things like “BOOKS$CASH,” they all point to one thing: end-of-term buyback being upon us. And while we can’t help you cram, format your bibliography, or get more sleep, we can help you sell more books back and get better prices for them. Here’s the skinny:

Buyback is very much on and if you don’t have a plan for how to turn your books into cash, you’re running out of time. If you’re planning on selling your books at the campus bookstore the day after finals, you’re likely to run into a lot of “Sorry, we’re not buying that title” and “Sorry, we can only give you $3.50 for this bio text.” Ouch!

Skip the sorries, step it up and secure your deals early and having scoped your options. It’s easy.

Grab the books you want to sell (don’t forget any CDs or other components that came with the book when you purchased it), stack them so that the ISBNs are easy to read, and visit the CampusBooks.com selling tool ASAP. While the selling tool has always brought you the best buyback prices from all over the Web (including bookstores, individual buyers, and marketplaces) all on one page, we’ve recently added even more buyers. More buyers means more options, more competition for your books, higher values, and of course, less time you’ll spend hopping sites. Let us do the comparisons and find you the best prices. Our massive array of buyers now includes nearly 20 major names!

  • Amazon
  • Better World Books
  • Blue Rocket Books
  • BookByte
  • BookStores.com
  • Cash4Books
  • Chegg
  • eCampus
  • FirstClassBooks
  • JitterBook
  • MyBookCart
  • SellBackYourBook
  • TextbookLink
  • Textbooks.com
  • TextbooksRus
  • TextbookWheel
  • ValoreBooks
  • WeBuyTextbooks

Got an iPhone or a Droid? Grab the CampusBooks.com Mobile App for Smartphones and save yourself the hand-keying. Use our app and your phone’s camera to scan the barcodes on your textbooks and find the highest buyback values going. It’s insanely easy and totally on the go.

Reminders and best practices:

  1. The keys to getting the best buyback prices are acting early and being an informed seller (finding the best values and reading the terms of the deal). You also need to follow through. When you find a good price for your books, go for it! Secure the quote and pack and ship your books ASAP. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll get your money.
  2. Take a gander at “Selling Back Books: A Few Simple Rules.” These rules and tips and reality checks will help you get through finals and buyback without losing your mind. Follow these guidelines and you will be well served to maximize your cash back and keep your sanity.

Now you’re armed with all the info you need to get the most this buyback season. Good luck on finals and happy selling!

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Sometimes we find ourselves so busy with the business of saving students money on textbooks and finding new ways to help them get more cash when selling their books back that we forget about some of the other useful stuff of on our website.

Since last we blogged, we’ve developed some really cool tools for students to use and we were reminded of a goldmine of resources on the site. Let’s take a minute to catch up and hopefully all of these offerings will come in handy as you hunker down to some studying.

First off, we totally revamped our iPhone app and added an app for Droid. Both put all of the buying and selling power of CampusBooks.com in the palm of your hand wherever you go and however you connect. Definite downloads.

Second, with mobile capabilities on our minds, we added local library and bookstore inventories to our search results so you can see if your books are available nearby and ready for pickup. And yep, you’ll see this functionality on our website and our smartphone apps.

Third, we did some general site maintenance and were reminded what a treasure trove of info and links we have, including pages and pages of academic resource links spanning the entire education spectrum. From information about study skills to discounts on software for students to whether an online degree is right for you, it’s all here.

Finally, we updated our big college bookstore directory with even more schools. Here you can find your campus bookstore’s hours and contact info, shop online at their site, and see for yourself just how much you can save on textbooks when you comparison shop with CampusBooks.com.

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It’s almost May and with that comes textbook-buyback time (not to mention getting into the swing of baseball season). Now, more than ever before, you have options about how and where and when to sell back your books. To help you wade through a sea of options and make informed choices so that you get the best buyback prices and the least hassle, we’ve put together a triple play of our best and most-useful buyback info, not to mention the straight-up truths that other folks may not tell you.

1) “Selling Back Books: A Few Simple Rules” is a must read. These rules and tips and reality checks will help you get through finals and buyback without losing your mind. Follow these guidelines and you will be well served to maximize your cash back and keep your sanity.

2) “Why’d She Get More Than I Got? Tales from the Buyback Trenches” is a conversation about an all-too-familiar frustrating incident that makes us cringe just to think about. Check it out for the scoop on how not to get a raw deal while a classmate gets a sweet one. Oh, and that offer in the last paragraph still stands. Tell us your story and we’ll hook you up with a gift card.

3) If you have an iPhone, you need the CampusBooks for iPhone App. In addition to finding the best deals when buying books, the app finds you the best buyback prices. Simply scan your book’s ISBN barcode and you’ll see both buying and selling options, all from your phone wherever you are. So if you’re standing in line at the bookstore and the clerk offers you a buyback price that feels like an insult, simply scan the barcode and find out if and where you can get more money back.

Now you’re armed with all the info you need to get the most this buyback season. Good luck on finals and happy selling!

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Several months ago, we wrote a blog entry entitled Money Matters: A Special Edition on Textbooks & Tax Credits. In this entry, we discussed the American Opportunity Credit, a subsection of the Hope and Lifetime Learning Credits.

That was a while ago and in the meantime and with your studies coming first, you may have lost sight of this important and beneficial bit of legislation. That, coupled with the fact that the deadline for filing taxes with the IRS is a mere two weeks away, is why we want to take a minute to remind you what the credit is all about and how it benefits you and how to take advantage of it. Here’s what you need to know when you file your taxes by April 15:

  • Under the American Opportunity Credit (AOC), students and their families are eligible for up to $2,500 in credits.
  • The credit can be claimed for the first four years of post-secondary education.
  • You can be reimbursed not just for tuition, but also for textbooks and other supplies purchased as course materials. It does not matter whether or not the materials were purchased at the institution where the student is enrolled. That said, if you got your textbooks from a merchant you found through CampusBooks.com, it still counts!

The time-frame that we’re looking at here is calendar year 2009 (the tax year). But the AOC will also be offered in 2010, so keep your receipts for next tax season when you may be eligible again!

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So much of what we read about the current job market is doom and gloom, but that’s not the case across the board. Some industries and some companies are growing, and CampusBooks.com is one of them. Right now we’re looking for a Senior PHP Developer to join our team.

Sure, you probably got to know us when you were a student looking to save money on textbooks or find the best deals for buyback, and we certainly hope that we were able to help you do these things. And now’s your chance to come work for us and become someone who helps pass on the best deals to other students.

CampusBooks.com is a fun company staffed by a great group of folks committed to coming up with cool solutions (like our on-the-go apps) to help college students and book lovers buy and sell books for the best prices. We also run an eco-friendly virtual office environment, which means that the new hire would work from his/her home office and not need to relocate. Interested candidates should check out the full job description.

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Our entire CampusBooks.com existence is based upon the belief that students and book-lovers need never pay full price for books and that retail bookstores, be they on university campuses or in malls, sell their wares at inflated prices. We believe that consumers have options, often more options than they know about, and that they can save money by shopping online. So for more than a decade now, we’ve made it our mission to create and enhance a single website where shoppers could see all of their options in one place. And we love it. Not a day goes by that we don’t get students thanking us and saying something to the effect of “I can’t believe how much I saved using your site! Thank you!” Our pleasure.

Recently, with the release of our iBookStore app for iPhone, in particular v2 with scanning, we offered students and book-lovers a totally revolutionary way to literally see the savings — in the palms of their hands while in the bookstore — and to then purchase the cheapest books available in the entire marketplace with just a few touches of the screen.

To illustrate exactly what we’re talking about and why iBookStore is so innovative and illuminating, we did an experiment. We armed an intrepid team of students with our iBookStore iPhone app and had them brave Chicago’s wintry weather to do a little textbook shopping in a few university bookstores. They made their way through the stores, scanning textbooks across disciplines and comparing store prices with online deals — all from the free iBookStore app on their iPhones.

In addition to a few funny moments (and one that got a little tense when a bookstore clerk was uncooperative), the results of the price-comparison excursions are shocking but consistent (not to mention a good reminder of why CampusBooks.com was founded and that our work here is by no means complete). We urge you to visit our YouTube channel, check out these short videos, and see for yourselves that whether it’s medicine, humanities, economics, or law, university bookstores are overcharging students across the disciplines. Our team found that the average savings by using iBookStore was over 36% compared to the bookstore prices. And this statistic was just for new textbooks and didn’t even consider used books or textbook rentals where the opportunities to save are greater.

Watch the videos (iBookStore: Stop the Scam, Start the Scan Visit 1 and iBookStore: Stop the Scam, Start the Scan Visit 2) for details and you’ll see how time after time, our team scanned and saved, scanned and saved. It actually got a little scary for students buying from the bookstores, not to mention a little embarrassing for the bookstores overcharging their students. In fact, there was never an instance where a scan didn’t reveal that our team would save a good bit of money by buying through the iBookStore app instead of from the bookstore.

So in terms of saving and seeing for yourself that the power to stop the swindle lies in the palm of your hand, what are you waiting for? Download iBookStore, grab your iPhone, and head out to the bookstore on your campus. See for yourself just how much you can save and go for it; take advantage of the good deals and cheap books iBookStore finds for you then and there. And while you’re at it, film your own experience as a textbook hero and share it with us on YouTube. Show off your smart shopping and how you Stopped the Scam and Started the Scan!


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Welcome to one of the best shopportunities of the year, the time when post-holiday and end-of-year sales promise the biggest bargains available and many retailers hurry to make sales before the January 31 end of the fiscal year. Whether it’s technology and gadgets, clothing and accessories, home furnishings, or media such as music and movies, now is undoubtedly the time to buy!

And textbooks are no different. In fact, there have never been more academic books available (in both quantity and format) at better prices. The market is wide open and it’s rife with amazing savings for those savvy student shoppers who buy early. But by the same token, there’s also more demand and more competition for those deals, so in order to capitalize on them, you must act quickly.

Right now, the days just after Christmas and immediately before and after New Year’s Day, are some of the busiest days in the textbook business for all of the reasons stated above, and of course, with the spring term starting later this month. Money-saving used books are the most desirable commodity and the first to go flying off the shelves. If you’re waiting until you go back to school in hopes of striking bargains at the campus bookstore, you’ll be too late.

The good news is that CampusBooks.com offers students access to the most merchants who stock the greatest number of cheap used textbooks as well as new books on sale, eco-friendly inexpensive textbook rentals, and instantly downloadable eBooks. It’s all here for you right now and all you have to do is search for the books you need and you’ll see the best deals and be able to take advantage of them all without even setting foot in a jam-packed bookstore during rush.

The bad news is that every day that you wait to order your books for the upcoming term means a smaller selection from which to choose and the best deals having already gone to students who shopped earlier. So what can you do to boost your chances of getting the best deals? Well, first and foremost, if you know the books that you need for the upcoming term, order them now. If you don’t know which books you need, send a polite email to your professors asking for the ISBNs, titles, and authors for the texts you’ll be using. Professors are aware that textbooks are pricey and they want you to do well in their courses, which means doing the reading. A polite and appreciative email should be well received, and of course, as soon as you get the necessary information, find the absolute best deals using the CampusBooks.com price-comparison tool. You’ll feel great going into a new year and a new semester knowing that you saved big on your college textbooks.