One thing that I know for sure that every student, whether graduate or undergraduate, dreads at least twice a year is that time when it becomes necessary to go figure out what textbooks he or she is going to need for the coming semester and more importantly how much they are going to cost.  I think that I have personally dreaded this day ever since I started college back in the Fall of nineteen ninety nine.  I remember being so excited about planning my schedule, having it approved by my undergraduate advisor, and getting started with my college education.  That whole sentiment came to a grinding halt when I got to the bookstore, saw the lines of people getting books, and realized the price of the books that I was going to need.  Having been a biochemistry major, I needed those thick overpriced hardcovered textbooks that have just about everything that you ever wanted to know in that...and they also change editions just about every other year so there are hardly ever the coveted "used" copies available.  I think that I spent almost five hundred dollars on books for my first semester of school alone, which I realize is a far cry from the thousands of dollars that law school students spend each semester on their required books.  Of course as time went by, the amount of books and the types of books that I needed for my classes changed, so I ended up average just a couple hundred dollars a semester on books.  In graduate school, since we aren't taking any real introductory courses, the textbooks are a lot different.  That does not however mean that they are really that much more reasonably priced, at least for what you get.

I got a reminder of this whole process this morning as I was sitting around and killing time before heading out for more wedding preparatory activities.  I received an email from our university bookstore advertising that most books for the upcoming Fall semester had arrived and were available for reservation or purchase online.  I figured that I would take a moment and see what I was going to need for my classes.  I quickly learned that the text book for one of my classes that I already owned had been changed.  Not only had it been changed, but the new text that was replacing it was unnecessarily expensive and wasn't even yet available.  I immediately ventured to my favorite online resource for low priced books, amazon dot com, to see if I could get a head start on finding the book and a lower price than the nearly forty dollars that the bookstore was marking the work up to.  Since it is a very new book, they only had one copy that had been used, but I surely didn't waste any time jumping on the opportunity to pick up the correct edition of the text book for class at a far discounted price of seventeen dollars.  All in all, I ended up saving almost sixty percent on the price of the book...and I knew that my other classmates would not be doing the same, since there weren't any more used copies available, and the others found even at amazon dot com were more expensive than the bookstore was offering.  That just goes to show you that the early bird really does get the worm...or at least the textbook savings!