Throughout my years at college, I have realized that the amount of money spent on textbooks can sometimes be astronomical.

I have observed at various college bookstores, that the prices are sometimes much more expensive compared to the deals that can be found at online bookstores.

Many college students have heard of chegg.com or half.com.

These types of sites have some of the best deals on textbooks.
Whether new or used; renting or buying; these websites are the way to go when it comes to getting the best deal.

One of the positive things about the college bookstore, is its convenient factor.
It is much easier just to go to class on the first day, talk to the professor, and make sure we are getting the right textbook, and then go buy it and start reading.

Sure, I believe it is easier in some cases.
But the convenience factor is something I believe we are paying for.

The smarter and more economical thing to do, is to email our professors a month before classes start, and ask them: Which textbooks should I get?

This way, not only will we know which textbooks to get, we will be able to use an online bookstore, and be able to get the best deals.

If we do it far enough in advance, we will get our books in time for the first day of classes. For almost all of my classes this semester, I am using used textbooks.
It has its advantages and disadvantages.

First off using used textbooks, is so much cheaper and it gets the job done.
Its disadvantages can range from ripped pages, to some of the craziest doodles that I have ever seen.

I do however, take notice to the unfortunate highlighting efforts made by the previous owner.
While going through my books, I notice that throughout Chapter 1 in most of them, they made a pretty modest effort to highlight the most important parts, but as each chapter follows another, the highlighting takes absence.

Through these observations, we can see that the previous owner of the book, veered in his or her ways when it came to studying and reading.

Another thing I noticed while studying for psychology, is that the previous owner of the book, only highlighted the already bold vocabulary words.

Why would someone take the time to highlight a word that is already bold?
It makes no sense.

All that bthe previous owner did was waste time and ink, to say the least. The textbook industry, what a scam.

In my opinion, it is the biggest scam since the carpet sweeper.
Nevertheless, while ordering my human communications book, I bought the newest edition which was last updated in 2011.

I figured that most of this book would be up to date, but boy was I wrong. After reading the first chapter, I had realized that most of this chapter had not been updated in a long time.

The only thing that seemed to be updated was the book’s brief reference to Twitter.

Other than equally small changes to the book, this book is essentially the same as its previous editions.

We all have moved on to faster browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and the increasingly popular Google Chrome.

Heck, even Internet Explorer is getting to the point where it seems outdated.
Nevertheless, it also suggests that not every college in the United States has access to the World Wide Web.

Not updating this book to the fullest extent is ethically wrong.

I think as students, we deserve an up-to-date version of textbook material every year.
We are paying lots of money on textbooks and we deserve the best information available.
If we have the best information available, I believe we can learn better, and effectively become smarter individuals.

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