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Why buy a textbook when the library is free?

Get Textbooks at your Library

The library has been around for hundreds of years, yet as time went by I think we've used it less and less.  It's funny though, while going to college I noticed that many students never use the library for its actual intended use.  Many students just go their study or rather yet, sleep.  But the crown jewel of the library, is every piece of literature and research papers that exist there.  This also includes the schools subscriptions to thousands of scholarly journals accessible to students who want to do research. 

Well in this tutorial, I'll have you back in the library in no time.  Whether you'll use the library to do your own self-research is up to you.

Things to consider...
1. Your professor usually puts one copy of the class textbook as reference material in the  library.  This allows a student to check the book out for about an hours time until they have to return it to the desk.  This isn't the best compromise in your education, but you better believe that you'll use that 1 hour of time more efficiently than if you owned the book and had hours to spend reading it.

2. Does the professor allow you to use an older edition of the textbook?  If the professor lets you
 use an older edition, you might get away with checking out the older edition and using that as your home textbook.  If you need to see if their are new problems on the later edition, just go to the library and borrow the one put on reference by the professor.

Get started...
Well crack your knuckles and get in front of a computer and follow the video tutorial on this page.  You'll be saving some big money.

You shouldn't always put a price on your education.  Make sure to consider whether or not buying the actual textbook will be useful for you.  I know a lot of friends who love to sell their textbook RIGHT after the class is over.  I can understand if the class isn't in their major, but if your selling books back that are your major, well then you might be doing a disservice to yourself.  

You may not realize, but the textbooks in your upper division classes (even lower divs.) can one day be reference material for you at the work place.  One day you might be sitting at work and you have to do some sort of complicated engineering problem and you wish you had that textbook you sold back for 40 bucks.  But during that time all you could think about was how you were going to use those 40 dollars to buy yourself tickets to a concert.  And unfortunately you got your boss yelling at you while you slow the company down.  

It's a little extreme of an example, but it doesn't hurt to encourage you to keep your textbook.