The Absolute Cheapest Way to Get Your Books

By Phil Ruddle |News Editor|

Buy all of your textbooks online this quarter and avoid the bookstore to save money.
There are a lot of online sites you can go to purchase or rent a book whether it be digital or hard copy such as amazon and half.com, however websites with a universal search engine that are designed to find the cheapest prices for books is the way to go.
Bigwords.com is the best search engine option because its sole purpose is to find the absolute cheapest way to get your book.
All you do is type in the title of the textbook or the ISBN number, add all the books you want, go to your book-bag (shopping cart), and click start price comparison. BigWords then compares every possible item, store combination, and then calculates all current promotions, coupons, and shipping, in order to find you the best deal.
Even if you are buying multiple textbooks, BigWords takes that into account to find a specific website or store that sells all of them so you don’t have to order from multiple places.
You can also edit your search options to your exact needs. For example, lets say you added four textbooks to your book-bag and BigWords tells you that the cheapest option is to rent all of them used.
What if you want to keep one of the four books and purchase it?
Well all you have to do is click on the pricing page on that book, select “ignore all rentals for this item,” and wallah, it will alter the price to your selection.
Big Words is best used as a ninja price comparison.
There are times when the cheapest copy of a textbook is a used hardcover on amazon or a digital file on Kindle. Sometimes it isn’t, and its cheaper to rent for the semester versus buying it. Big Words figures all that out for you.
“Despite the growing trend of renting textbooks, the data and research we’ve gathered suggests that buying and reselling books at the end of the semester is more beneficial, saving students more money,” explains Jeff Sherwood, founder and CEO of bigwords.com
The average annual cost for textbooks at a four-year university is $1,137, according to a study done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and after researching the top 1,000 most-searched-for textbook titles nationally by college students, BigWords found that after buying the cheapest used book and reselling it at the end of the term, students save an average of $56.64 per book, as opposed to renting, according to the company’s study.
“We have been at it since 2001 and our primary concentration is to make sure that our technology is primarily focused on finding the cheapest copy of the right textbook,” explained Jeff Sherwood.
Do not make any rush buys this quarter for your books on the first website you see or run to the closest bookstore near you.

Remember to check library as some professors provide a copy of the textbook to be checked out for a certain number of time. Do your research and find out the cheapest way to get what you need, or better yet, just have BigWords do it for you.