Textbook Discounts

September is a textbook-buying month. Millions of students and their parents are fretting about the cost of books, one of the biggest expenses in a college student’s budget. The easiest thing to do is to go down to the school store and buy everything you need. But school stores rarely have the best prices for course texts. How do you know if you’re getting a good deal?

Bigwords is here to help. This free iPhone application does the shopping around for you. Simply enter the title, author or ISBN code for each textbook and hit the “Add to Bookbag” button. When you’ve entered all of the books, click on the price comparison button. The app will calculate the price and find cheapest place to get all of the books, taking into account shipping costs and discounts. Bigwords searches all of the popular sellers including Amazon, eBay, CourseSmart and Textbooks.com. You can choose to search for used books or new. If you’re worried about buying from a stranger online, you can exclude third-party sellers, like those on Amazon Marketplace.

Once it has found the best deal, Bigwords can take you straight to the purchasing page. Enter your address and payment deals and sit back and wait for the books to arrive. Alternatively, the application can e-mail you the search results so you can complete the transaction over the phone.

Bigwords can save you as much as 66% of the cost of college books. You can spend hours going from one site to another looking for cheap textbooks, or you can use this free cell phone app. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still take advantage of the savings by going to www.bigwords.com and doing the search from there.