A general textbook thread. I know a lot of Massassians have different fields of studies (with their respective material) with classes/schools that do different things differently, but what's your general views on textbooks?

For those who graduated or went higher up, have you ever regretted selling certain textbooks that you bought? Have you had experiences where you bought a textbook (at school's price) that was outright waste of money?

Did you ever buy import copies? Share/photocopy with other students? Anything besides the usual "selling back" of books?

I buy International Editions whenever possible. Often I can get an Intl book new for $40 when the book store has it for $150 used.

I sell most of them, either back to the bookstore if I'm lazy or on eBay. I keep some of them that I really like. I kept my General College Biology book (it was like $300 and it's aweomse), kept my General Physics book (used it for all 3 general physics classes) and also kept my Calc book (calc 1-3).

Getting books online is hugely cheaper than buying them at a campus book store.

The one book I've regretted selling was my Deformable Bodies book for engineering. Some of the same material is in some other books I have, but it is tough to piece everything together.

If you're a member of a professional society like the American Society of Mechanical Engineers they may have an online library of books. I've used one a good bit at work.

I don't buy every book, even ones that are "required" by some of my courses; however, I buy the good ones. I buy the ones I think I will continue to use after school. Sometimes I'll just search for a PDF ebook if it's a relatively popular college textbook (with solutions too).

I think I bought 4 textbooks total at university and all but one was a waste of money and unnecessary for the course.

If I was currently in school I'd "acquire" my textbooks in an eBook format & save myself a ton of money & physical space.

I wish I had the option of not buying textbooks. Everything on our "required" lists is actually required.

I've kept a lot of my Econ textbooks, those are pretty good and I was very pleased with how easy they were to read considering they got pretty mathematical at some points.

Otherwise I always sell em back, and I usually sell em back to the a little shop that is affiliated with the university. They offer slightly better prices than the book store usually. They will often still take used copies of old editions even when they know the course is getting updated, so its handy to have so you can see if you need the newest edition for real or not (because they know professors love to do that to get us to buy their textbooks at full price).

Nowadays I always look hardcore for pdf versions or ebook versions, but I haven't had much luck this year, unfortunately. My books are going to be required all at about 150 bucks a pop.

Yeah, I still have my Calculus textbook, although I must have only used it maybe three or four times over three years, if that. If I needed to check something I either hit up the internet or looked in the library, or just did the stuff our lecturers gave us.

That was the only book I got for Uni as well. I can't remember what was on the reccommended reading list, aside from that textbook. Well, and a non-textbook, "this is interesting" sort of read.

Mainly this. I have a couple that I kept which are excellent, especially for torsion. There are better professional books in my field of work.

I probably bought 40-50 books throughout the course of college and used pretty much every one of them (had to, I mean if you didn't have the textbook in 90% of my classes, you were screwed when it came to stuff like homework). Trying to use PDFs or eBooks for college textbooks would've driven me nuts because they utterly suck for random access.

Debatable. If using the textbook for homework assignments, they're great. Reading from ebooks for extended periods sucks. However, PDFs are searchable.

I often buy books that aren't even required. One of my last purchases was the 40th edition of Gray's Anatomy (150 years anniversary edition). Amazing book, beautiful edition. I'm kind of a nerd for books.

I read for hours at a time w/o issue on my iPad. I could never go back to reading paper books again. It's so nice being able to access a dictionary w/ a tap, leaving notes w/ virtual post-it's & no longer having to pay for books (the new PDF section of iBooks doesn't discriminate against copywrited books). It'll be awesome when more e-textbooks take advantage of the possibilities (e.g: imbedded animations).

Now if only it were e-ink, so that it doesn't gouge your eyes out over time from the backlighting.

I bought a couple for my undergrad, but as Detty said, they were mostly a waste of money. I either sold them back or a few might be at my mum's house.

I've (very very nearly) completed my Masters without buying a single book. Libraries ftw.

It would be nice to have e-ink but the screen certainly doesn't bother my eyes. I used to hear similar complaints about reading on a desktop monitor but I've done that for years w/o an issue as well. It's nice being able to change the backlight w/ a tap. I find that I use it on very dim settings almost all of the time.