Why Buy Electronic College Textbooks
Electronic Textbooks are New and Productive
Does anyone else remember having sore shoulders from walking 5 miles up hill both ways to school? Well not anymore. Students shouldn't have to carry textbooks at all. The new hip thing to do and one day industry standard will be to have electronic textbooks. There are many advantages to having electronic textbooks that far succeed the disadvantages. They vary from weight to price and how the money is spent for them. These methods increase time, are clean and very hard to lose. Its actually impossible to lose your books anymore if there electronic. Most sites allow you to have an online account to log into to always be able to access books that you purchased. This would make it easy for students to always have a copy of the book they need for homework or during school.
How Electronic Textbooks cut down your College Costs
This is really understandable by Amazon's kindle approach to electronic textbooks. The average college student spends a ton of money on books and are then penalize the whole time for having them! Here is a good analysis of where your dollar goes when you buy a college textbook.
College Textbook Dollars
The data, courtesy of the NACS Foundation, illustrates Amazon’s
opportunity. More than 32 cents of your textbook dollar goes to paper,
printing and edit costs. Toss in freight and a third of your textbook
dollar goes to stuff that can be eradicated with a Kindle.
Used Textbooks will be Extinct
There are a few talkbacks below wondering about the used book market and whether Amazon would need one. I don’t buy it. Here’s why:
Say you buy a textbook for $100. Everyone knows you get a little less then half back when you sell them. So here’s the math:
- You buy text book for $100;
- You’re out of $100 for a semester;
- You sell the textbook back for $47.50;
- You’re out of $52.50 total, but your cash flow was gone for a semester. That money could have been used for other types of supplies and expenses, including train fare or gasoline.
With electronic textbooks Amazon will charges you say $35 for a textbook. Your upfront cost is $35, there are no lines for returning the book and you keep it. This helps you save time and even without the use of a used book market you come out ahead of what you could have spent.
Quick Electronic Textbook Recap
Say if you were going to buy all your textbooks at college bookstore price. Your have five books to get (Fictional Titles and Prices):
- Advance Biology Textbook: $217 | Electronic Book: $152
- English in America Volume 7 Textbook: $175 | Electronic Book: $122
- Calculus for Biology Textbook: $135 | Electronic Book: $94
- New Age Scientist Textbook: $75 | Electronic Book: $50
- Tips and Tricks for Cloning Textbook: $193 | Electronic Book: $135
Total Textbook Cost: $795
Total Electronic Textbook Cost: $553 +Cost of Kindle ($139) = $693
Clearly you can see as much as I can, for ONE SEMESTER of books even with the price of the Kindle, you save money! Then think about the other 3 semesters for an Associates degree, and even more for Bachelors! The savings are outstanding, you never have to sell books back, and you have them for life - no need to worry about every losing them!
