There’s an add-on called Hyperwords for the Firefox browser that I’ve been using for number conversions (square feet to acres, US dollar to other currencies), language translation, and searches, but I found a handy new use for it yesterday that I thought would be helpful to incoming students–comparison shopping for textbooks.
Hyperwords allows you to right-click on a word or phrase and search multiple online stores for the item. That means that you can go to a page such as a college bookstore list for courses you’re taking in September, select and right-click the title of one of the texts, and then search one or many vendors for your books. (I ended up using a combination of Amazon and AbeBooks for two courses I’m taking in the fall.) See the video below for a demonstration of Hyperwords.
I just read a New York Times article about a company called Chegg that rents college textbooks. What a good idea!
Alan Bradford, a senior at Arizona State University, read about Chegg in a campus newspaper in 2008 and calculated that his bill for books that semester would have been $334 with Chegg, far less than the $657 he paid. Since then, he has ordered about a dozen textbooks from Chegg.
“Nobody likes paying for textbooks,” he said.
CHEGG is shorthand for “chicken and egg,” a reference to what Mr. Rashid called students’ quandary after graduation: they need experience to get a job, but can’t get experience without having a job.
As a test case, I looked up the price for the text that is being used for Microcomputer Applications this summer. Microsoft System 2003 sells for $100 new, and a used copy of the book costs $81 at the college bookstore. It is available for $25 on Half.com or Amazon, but costs only $9.99 to rent. I’m not sure what shipping costs. If anyone tries Chegg, write a comment below to tell us what it was like and whether you are happy with the service.
First of all, Eid Mubarak (Happy Eid) to all those observing the holiday of Eid al-Adha. I noticed that there are lots of beautiful photos on Flickr tagged for the day.
On a completely unrelated and more mundane note, today textbook buyback starts here on the Rindge campus. You can return your course texts to the college bookstore between now and December 17th… but don’t return books you might need in future courses. Your writing handbook, A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker, will be vital in any course for which you have to write papers (that is, almost all of them.) Also, if you have a major that requires comp exams later on, you may need your textbooks to prepare for that. Don’t return them unless you know they won’t be needed for later study.
