I'll school you at your own game, textbooks!

Semester 2 of My New Career starts next week. God help us all if I am still writing about all this and it's semester 10; something tells me I will be. This schooling will be a long haul the way I am going. This spring, two courses for sure, with a possible addition of two more classes later this semester.

So, this bad-ass has been doing her book-shopping. In case you don't remember Textbook Hell from your days as an undergrad, let me refresh you. In the college bookstore, every textbook costs as much as the class. Books are bought back for about 1/2 of what you paid for them. Unless of course your water-bottle leaked on them, weakening the binding, and rendering them worthless. And those are the ones that are considered for "buy-back." If the textbook has a new addition issued right after you've used it (when isn't it?) your old volume is worthless. If the teacher is the author of the book, you need to use their obsolete tome which is expensively, privately published, and without a doubt, the teacher is retiring at the end of your term. So you are stuck with it. Ya know, just a little something for your home collection (we all know the douche nozzles who display their World Religions textbooks on their mahogany shelf.)

But, it does not have to be this way. No, no, no, no, no. Scot and I, WE WISED UP! This is 2010! Brick-and-Mortar book shopping is so...1995. The time when I stood for that kind of shit. This is the era of "find is cheaper, schmuck." We went on eBay and were blown away. While books still cost a bundle to buy, they were cheaper than the bookstore. And we realized were sitting on a goldmine. Scot's MBA books had been rolled into his tuition. He got the business books off the Mahogany bookshelf (teasing- top shelf of the closet) and listed the books on eBay. Seven have sold for the whopping happiness sum of $428.

One of my textbooks I require is an independently published book. We went to school to investigate. It had the college name emblazoned on the spine, cover, and title page. Not to be deterred from finding a cheaper source, Scot actually scanned the ISBN number into his phone. No match. It was a forced buy. But at $27, I didn't feel nauseous.

My other textbook is offered for sale in the bookstore for $69 (used). Scot did a scan, and found it available for approximately $45 (eBay). Good, but not great. This is where I got creative. I need the 2nd Edition. Amazon.com offers a wonderful feature where you can look inside a book. I pulled up two screens and compared the Table of Contents from the 1st and 2nd editions. I determined that there were approximately 10 pages difference between the two books. A little bit about computers in health care, and terrorism were added to the 2nd edition, and frankly I bet I can figure out what changed between 2001-2008.

I bought the 1st edition from a used bookseller on Amazon for a grand total, shipping included, of $5.71.

Come May, I will go online and try to re-sell it.