Textbook prices weighing you down? Look for books elsewhere

It's the time of year again when your excitement for the new semester is painfully crushed by exorbitant book prices.

"My god," you ask yourself. "Why are these books so outrageously priced? It's a book!" At this point you are escorted from the bookstore for yelling and sweating on the merchandise.

Textbooks, according to a poll done by the Wall Street Journal, are one of the factors making college increasingly unaffordable.

With single books priced at over $200 new, it isn't difficult to spend $500-$600 or more on books for one semester.

Because of the amount of work it takes to create a limited number of them, textbooks are expensive.

Authors of textbooks may get 12-25% of the royalties, but the rest of your hard-earned cash goes to publishers, distribution prices and the mark up from bookstores.

With a limited number of these texts produced and a high demand for them every year, costs are driven up in accordance with the basic laws of supply and demand.

New editions of the same book can be published every year, making the previous edition obsolete and deeming it un-returnable at the bookstore.

Ultimately, you can't really blame one party for gouging you of around $2000 every academic year for books.

Distributors' book prices have been rising for the last few years.

Some professors have attempted to ease the sting of your newly emptied wallet by picking reasonably priced books, but others still order the new edition every year.

In some classes, however, it is just as easy to get by with an old edition purchased through another distributor, such as Half.com, or Beat the Bookstore.

Some students opt out of buying books all together and hope they can borrow one from a pal or depend on in-class lecture notes to pass exams.

Regardless, after selling books back at the end of each semester, it is difficult not to feel as if you've been screwed by the bookstore.

Most of the time, the bookstore will buy back your used textbooks at a fraction of the price they re-sell them for.

The only cure for the yearly book buying blues is to purchase textbooks from other sources.

Beat the Bookstore, which is close to campus on Natural Bridge, is notorious for selling cheap textbooks and paying you a reasonable price when they buy your used books.

Also, online stores such as Ebay and Amazon are excellent sources to purchase books on the cheap.

Sometimes discounts on those sites can be more than 100% of what you would pay at the bookstore (one book sold for $98 at the book store on campus sells for $0.96 on Amazon).