One of the biggest expenses every student has to deal with at the start of each new semester is textbooks. Luckily for poor college students’ wallets, there has been a growing trend in college classes to utilize PDFs of book chapters, articles and notes instead of textbooks. However, most of the standard PDF readers (like Adobe Acrobat or Preview on Macs) don’t allow you to make any sort of edits, so if you want to be able to add notes or highlight important sections like you would with a regular textbook, you’ll have to spend your money to print them out.

That’s why you should try out Nitro PDF Reader. It’s the only free PDF reader and creator on the market that also allows for editing. With Nitro PDF, you can highlight, underline, and cross out selections of text, add notes and more. You can even pull out important quotes and pictures to use later when creating study guides or writing papers!

Nitro PDF works great for collaborating on group projects, too. You can add in your own comments or edits, and then save and share them with others in your group. You can also reply to others’ comments directly into their comment box, which keeps the discussion thread focused onto one topic. Read More »

We all know the best part of going back to school is not buying textbooks. Reuniting with friends? Definitely. Kicking off another season of college football? Absolutely. Epic rush parties? Bring it on. Shelling out hundreds of hard-earned dollars for overpriced books? WTF.

Heading to the campus bookstore is your most convenient, but also most expensive option. Turning to online sites like Amazon for books can save you a buck, sure…if you don’t mind waiting half a semester for your books to arrive in the mail from random retailers all over the country.

What was once a losing battle, however, has been revolutionized by Chegg. In addition to offering a number of other academic services, they’ll get you your books — to purchase (new and used) or rent — when you need them, and for a great price.

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Our generation has been called a lot of things over the years, and not all of them have been particularly flattering. But I think we can all agree that we are the generation that thrives on technology. They call us the “thumb generation” because we’re always texting or typing, and that’s not really something we can argue with. We are the age of the internet, the cell phone, and the iPad. We are the age of all things digital.

Just think of all the technological developments that there have been since our parents were college seniors. For one thing, if you were a college girl when you mom was a college girl you wouldn’t be reading a blog. You wouldn’t even know what a blog is. You wouldn’t even have cordless phones, never mind a cell phone, AND you’d be using a typewriter to write your final papers. And none of it would have seemed the least bit weird to you. But it seems weird to us. But you know what, all the stuff that we do now may eventually seem outdated to our children some day.

Like what, you say? Why I’m so glad you asked…

School is starting soon and although I am fully stoked to party it up with my long-lost friends (we’re seriously having separation anxiety!), I keep thinking about how much money this semester is going to cost me. Mainly, the dreaded textbooks purchase.

I always try to get through the semester buying the least amount of books possible, but this semester I’ve loaded up on psychology courses. And for any Psych majors or minors out there, you know what that means – 100+ dollars for the latest editions (times 4 in my case!).

While my education is important, I have to believe that I can get my learn on without giving up my new shoe money! So I did some intense Googling combined with some asking around and came across BookRenter.com.

Now I’ve heard about renting books before, but I’ve always been into buying them; you know, just on the off-chance I’d want to keep them. Well in the 3-and-a-half years I’ve been in college the only books I’ve kept are ones that couldn’t be sold back, which means I’ve been throwing away money like it’s my j-o-b and I’ve finally realized the value of renting books.

So now you’re all like, okay, I like the idea of renting books, but what if I do miraculously love my economics book and don’t want to part with it?

Well if you decide you want to buy the book from BookRenter, you just keep it and pay the original purchase price! Or if you need to keep it for longer, like say maybe you had to take an incomplete in your Biology class and need the book to make up some tests, you can just extend the rental period.

And if you’re like me and need to highlight important passages or take little notes in the margins, which is another reason I’ve stayed away from rentals, BookRenter’s OK with that, too. Well, as long as you don’t go crazy with your doodles and mark up every. last. page. Minimal markings are fine (both for your GPA and for BookRenter) and really, there’s no need to go all Picasso with the highlighter in the margins. Read More »

With study sessions fueled by Hot Pockets and Monster energy drinks, Thanksgiving has been the light at the end of this dark tunnel. Seeing family and friends, eating a hearty home-cooked meal, and doing absolutely nothing but sleeping and shopping for days in a row… it’s almost too good to be true.

But it’s not! It’s real. And I’m so thankful for this refreshing calm before the storm that is finals that it almost makes me want to stay home in a cranberry sauce-induced food coma forever. Because as great as college life is and as grateful as I am to be here, there are a few aspects of it that I am oh so NOT thankful for.

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Campus bookstores suck. They convince you that you need to buy a textbook for $150, and you’ll crack it open on that one day you were bored feeling studious, before realizing your exams are straight from the class notes/Powerpoint slides and you don’t even need that 10 pound eyesore in the first place.

No harm done, you’ll just return it, right?

Right, except that you’ll receive a measly $20 (if you’re lucky).

I for one am tired of returning my (barely opened) books for a small fraction of what I paid for them. It’s spring, and I need every extra dollar for what’s really important in college: new bikinis and happy-hour margaritas, duh! So I decided to compile a list of places to do textbook business that are better than the bookstore. Try one of these on for size and then take all that moolah to the bank (or Lulus.com). Read More »

[It's pretty obvious that the average CollegeCandy reader has some very strong opinions. Opinions that she likes to share with everyone on the site. We love a strong woman, so we thought we'd give her a real forum to discuss her thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. Every Friday I'll be featuring a hot topic (like the gyno-gender debate!) and leaving it up to you, the readers, to duke it out. So, read it and get your debate on in the comments section below!]

It’s textbook time again - the moment when you look down your syllabus and groan at the hundreds of dollars that could have gone to things like food (or that fantasy fall wardrobe) that you will instead be laying down for an eight-pound anatomy book. Sigh. Well, don’t get your panties in a bunch just yet; suddenly, there may be other options. Between some schools giving out Kindles for free <incoherent jealous muttering> and a few textbook companies making their wares available for download on smart phones, this year we could do away with the piles of heavy, bound books…

But do we want to? Read More »

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I’m not gonna lie – I love buying textbooks.  Yes, they are expensive and, yes, they are heavy and annoying to carry around.  But after enrolling for your classes and getting your book lists, there’s something about buying brand new books full of things you don’t know (I may or may not pretend to be Hermione Granger when I go textbook shopping…) that is just sort of…exciting.

Usually, this magical feeling fades after about two weeks of lectures, homework, and quizzes.  Then they are just regular books, collecting dust on my dorm room floor.  That is, until the semester ends and it’s time to try and get some of your cash back (because, let’s face it, you’re broke after spending your weekends at the bar instead of actually reading those books).

There are tons of places to sell back your books.  You could go to the campus bookstore (and get ripped off), the slightly off-campus bookstore (and get ripped off), sell them in your dorm, or use the hundreds of sites on the internet that offer great prices and relatively little hassle (too good to be true?).  I usually use the internet, unless I’m really in need of cash NOW.  To this point, I haven’t had an issue with selling my books back online, but I have always been a bit wary.

What if the website is lying and I never get my check?  What it something happens with the mail and my books disappear?

Turns out, maybe my fears weren’t so baseless.  One of our readers was recently scammed by a website that buys and sells textbooks from students.  Textbookwheel.com offers great prices for books and free shipping, obviously a very enticing offer.  Only, what you get in return is a check that’s about 1/10 of what you were originally offered and a note saying most of your books were lost in the mail (weird how that can happen when you send them in one big box…).  In fact, you’d be lucky to get a check at all.

Places like amazon.com and ebay.com have been proven effective and safe (for the most part) for years.  With new textbook sites popping up every day, it’s hard not to be tempted by their prices, but maybe it’s better to stick with what you know.  Sometimes all those great offers (like the one our reader fell for) are too good to be true. Don’t fall for them.

If you are selling your books, excercise caution – after all, you spent a lot of time and money buying these books, you don’t want to just give them away.  If you did, you could have dumped ‘em at the campus bookstore…or held onto them for a much-needed coffee table.

I love books. I just unpacked my massive book collection and filled like ten shelves with those suckers. Everything from horror to fantasy to sci-fi to children’s to textbooks – I refused to sell anything back because it was pretty much a rip off. Seriously, $15 for a book I spent $100 on? And never opened? I’d rather lug those bad boys home and use them to prop up a broken table than let those bookstores scam future students with them!

Take that, bookstores!

So, despite my general love of books in the book form (there is nothing more satisfying than the sound of a book being cracked for the first time), I have begun to let my eyes wonder over to the E-Reader realm. It’s a bit cheaper when you add up the cost of all those books you’re buying, it’s good for the trees of the world, and since there has been talk of loading text books onto them, they are definitely something to look into.

And if not, I could still carry my ENTIRE library around with me without the aid of a large, burly moving man.

Yes, some are totally out of anyone’s price range and some are really crappy, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one out there for you. There are two really good options for e-readers out there today and I know that one of them will work for you. Trust me. Read More »