Am I being scammed?
 

I'm on the text book hunt for this fall. A friend of mine found this website http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qs...&qwork=3049002

with a book I need on it, and new the price is 130.00, but it's advertising used for $2.50 - which of course sounds too good to be true. I've never heard of the website, anybody have any info or opinions?

I've never heard of the site, but I just looked and clicked on "see detail" under where it says $2.69 Quick Buy. On that section you can ask the seller a question. I would make sure that it's the correct version that you'll need. Usually the version that is really cheap is SUPER old and it's not the one you'll be needing for your current class. Good luck! I hope it's the right one because then that'd be sweet deal!

I've purchased books through Alibris before with good luck. They are a network of booksellers across the country. You aren't really buying from Allibris - they are kind of like ebay :)

Just be careful when you pick, and double check the ISBN and the edition, or you may end up with an old version that is useless to you.

I have never heard of it, but I can recommend half.com as an awesome resource for used textbooks.

It might be fine, but I like websites to have some sort of verification stamp on them-- Whether from paypal, or otherwise. If you enter the site to put in your credit card information, and there is NO "Https://" before your link-- DO NOT put anything in there! It's not a secure server :)

Good luck!

Alibris is a really reputable book website, but I think that they allow different people and bookstores to sell books on their website. Most are reputable and will send you your book really quickly, but you ARE always taking a chance.

That said, a book that is 127 dollars off list price is probably a really old edition or maybe in poor shape. An old edition may or may not be a problem depending on how you use the book in your class. In some classes, I've been able to get away with an older edition or an international edition, but in one class we had to do all the questions at the end of the chapter and all of the numbers in the International Edition were WAY different. If you want to be sure to have the right edition, I'd be sure to search using the ISBN number instead of just the title of the book because each new edition has a different number.

:( Damn.

Wrong ISBN number :(

Thanks for the advice! As of now, I've only got 100 dollars to buy text books with until September 3rd, and classes start on the 25th of August. Not a huge deal, but it usually takes a while to ship anything up to Alaska. But even on Ebay it's impossible to find anything for under 60 dollars - and one of my books for this semester is 250 dollars. Mannnn college prices suck.

Do NOT use this site.

I bought a textbook from them a few years back. It was dirt cheap, way cheaper than it was at the bookstore. I had the intentions of using the book and selling it to the book store at the end of the semester. I got the book and the cover was missing.....

I now know that the cover is removed from a book for a very good reason. They usually do this when a book is ordered off the shelf (discontinued, didn't sell, whatever).

I complained several times and never heard back from the company.

Make sure of the edition before you buy it at that price--it may be a lot older than the one your professor is using. My DD bought her textbooks at half.com and had good success and pretty good savings.

I've not used this service, but I checked the book on amazon.com, which I use a LOT. There are several editions of the book, and on amazon.com the book is listed at $130 new and for used & new (indicating private sellers) it ranges from 38 cents to $64, but there are several editions. And you might need a specific edition.

Sometimes the variation in a textbook edition is so minute, that an old edition is "just as good" as the current one, but sometimes this isn't the case.

My understanding is that alibris has a good reputation, but I've never used it. However, I routinely buy from the private sellers on ebay, and I always check their feedback scores first. If alibris has seller ratings, I'd do the same.
At amazon, the s/h is usually about $4.

So either at alibris or amazon, you would be able to spend less than $5 to take a chance on a (probably) earlier edition of the book. But whether or not you want to take that chance, is a more difficult question. You could talk to the instructor and ask his or her opinion or input (he or she might be familiar with the differences between editions if he or she has used the same textbook for several years), or ask if you would be able to borrow a current textbook to compare it to the edition you've got (some instructors keep extra copies of the textbooks, or have them on reserve at the school library).

Actually, kaplods, there's no quick way to tell how much a new edition has been changed--but often there are many changes. I work in textbook publishing, and although it's true that some changes are "cosmetic," sometimes whole sections and the information in them change, and sometimes problems sets and such change, and that can put the student at a disadvantage if using an older edition.

Make sure the ISBN matches, and look around for good prices. But be aware that the sites that allow people to sell on them don't do any screening or verification of the sellers. Look for sellers that have a good reputation--usually this is indicated by reviews, stars, etc.

Jay

Last year I ordered a philosophy book for $4 used on half.com..
The regular price is $80, and when I tried getting it used at my college , it was $60!! The condition was also better than I expected.. it just looked like it was used once or twice~ So I mean, you could look up reviews about the site to make sure it's legit and double-check the ISBN.. so it's possible..
Personally Half.com has saved me SOO much money.. that and amazon.com so if you're feeling iffy about the site, you could try one of those, you may find someone selling their book for around the same price.

My freshmen year my college professor actually recommended half.com. But I haven't bought a book from the website because I was still a little weary of it. I have never heard of the other site, but if it sounds too good to be true it probably isn't.

Alibris is definitely a reputable website. I work in a library and although we don't order from Alibris right now, I can tell you it is one of the biggest online sites to find out of print books. However, like some parts of Amazon, many of the items are actually sold by independent bookstores. You can check the individual seller's reliability rating before you decide to purchase it.

abebooks.com is another very reliable used book site.

And there's also paperbackswap.com which is not just for paperbacks. It is a free (to join and to use) book swapping site. You list all the books you don't want and another list for all those you do. The systems matches wants. You pay to mail out books (media rate) to their new owners and get a "credit" which you then use to order the books you want (which only cost that one credit, nothing more). No SPAM, no advertisements. It's a Great site with more than 2 million books in circulation. (they also have a CD and DVD sister site and you can swap credits between the sites - I usually mail out CDs and use the credits to get books and movies... all my dieting books and workout DVDs have come from these sites (and usually gone back into the mix again after a while.)

Feel free to PM if you have questions but the sites are great and I'm not affiliated in anyway (I do get a credit if you say I sent you but I always just give that back to the new member anyway)

I always had good luck just borrowing my text books from the campus library each term.

(Yes, the ones for my degree program, I bought, because I wanted to keep them. But for classes I had no long-term interest in but had to take for core requirements, the library was a great option. Just had to keep going back in every few weeks to renew the book.)

OP--the site is legit in the same way half.com and eBay.com or the "marketplace" at amazon.com are. Great advice already on checking the ISBN, edition number, and--if you have plans to resell the book--whether it's a legit copy being sold (i.e.: the cover is intact). I'm a published author and I earn ZERO dollars if someone sells my books with covers removed. It's how the distributor "marks" non-returnables, FWIW. (Hopefully, they've already been sold once by then, though, and I've received my pay for the initial purchase.)

HTH!

As a college professor, I would second talking to/emailing the instructor if you can. I have a sense of how much the editions I use have changed over time, or even the degree to which I rely on the textbook!

There are some cases where I tell students the older edition is fine, and others where I can tell them it's a very bad idea!

I've never heard of it, but it looks like other members have had pretty good luck with it. I'd still be careful, because it seems very odd to me that someone could be selling a $130 book for less than $5.

I have used these sites with excellent success, I purchased an out of print book , described as like new condition. When I received it, it looked like it was brand new, it didn't appear to have been used at all. The cost .01, that's right one cent, the shipping charge was more than the cost of the book.

I didn't mean to imply that there is a quick or an easy way to make a comparison between editions, or even a slow and difficult way without having a copy of both books. However, I have known people (including myself) who have used a prior edition without problems, and I've often recommended them to students when I was teaching in community college.

But, as Heather has already stated, the first step is talking to the instructor. When I taught classes, I knew the differences between editions enough to be able to offer an opinion to the student as to whether an older edition would be useable. Not all instructors do this, but most are familiar with the edition changes enough to be able to give an informed opinion. In the entry level classes, any information I gave in lecture, was also in the book. Anything I tested on, was always in the lecture. If anything in a lecture wasn't covered by the book, I would let the class know (I'd wave my arms around to emphasize the fact - HEY this isn't in the book, so pay attention).

As I told my students, you could probably pass my tests without the book, if you come to every class and take good notes. You can probably pass my class without coming to lecture, if you read the book carefully. If you want an A, you probably should do both.

Each instructor is different, but they should know how important it is to have the book, and the most current edition of it.

Be careful of that... could be an outdated edition that would be totally useless to you now.

Another advantage of talking to the instructor - when I was teaching, our community college had the policy that instructors would be generallly be given a couple copies of textbook to use as they wished. If the edition didn't change, and you were teaching the same class during a later semester, you still might get your two copies of the textbook, so you could accumulate extra text book copies.

Generally, I kept one for myself, if there wasn't an instructor's edition of the text, and if I had them, I'd have two put on hold in the library. One could only be read in the library and had a two hour limit on checkout (you could check it out again, if no one asked for it during that time), and another could be checked out for 24 hours.

Once I loaned a student a textbook for the entire semester, because I knew she was in a VERY bad financial situation, and I happened to have extra copies from previous semesters.