Getting your textbooks at a good price

Hints/Warnings:

Click here to see what book is planned for use in your class. Take a look at the picture on the cover and get its ISBN number. Print out this page so you will remember what the cover and ISBN number are. After you look at a dozen or so for sale you will have forgotten.
Use only the ISBN number when you search for a text. Never depend on the title of the book and the author. Then if something goes wrong, you can be pretty sure you didn’t make a mistake in selecting the wrong edition number or something like that.
Check the picture on the cover.
Make sure you give plenty of time to get the book, so if it is not correct you can send it back and get a replacement.
BE CAREFUL! If they don’t say up front which edition they are selling, and if they don’t show a picture of the book, it is probably not what you need.
It’s probably best to pay through PayPal or a credit card where you are pretty sure they will force the seller to correct any of their errors.
Consider asking the professor if the previous edition of the text would reasonably work, especially if only the homework problems have changed. In that case, get with someone else in the class and one of you buy the proper edition, and others buy the previous edition, and share the homework problems. Some publishers are notorious about making zero changes in the text between editions, and only changing a few numbers in the homework problems, and sometimes doing nothing more than renumbering the problems or adding in a few new ones.
Consider renting a textbook if you don’t think you need it later, or getting an eBook. If you get an eBook, be sure to bring your tablet or whatever to the professor before class and explain why you have it open while he is lecturing. It might even be wise to contact them and ask if they are OK with that. You can find your professor listed on the list of courses on Howdy. If they aren’t listed yet, see last semester’s professors and contact one of them and ask if their department is OK with eBooks.
You can put the ISBN number directly into Google and get a lot of offers, but the sites below are pretty well geared up to sell at the best prices.
Note that nothing beats the bookstore for reliability, ability to return the book if the professor changes their mind, convenience, speed. If they didn’t have some kind of advantage over the internet they would have long ago gone out of business.

Web sites to check for book prices. Some may be dead, several get bought out by others and go to the same place. All are considered reliable.