Assorted bookstore merchandise. (Ariele Kehler/The Quill)
Shopping for textbooks will never be fun because it’s just another way for you to spend your hard earned money. Hopefully with the help of some of these features on the bookstore’s website, this process can be a little less painful for you in the coming terms, or even in this term.
Are you an introvert beyond compare? Or someone with a super busy schedule and exactly no time available to stand in lines? Then I have the solution for you! Rather than going and looking for your textbooks on the shelves at the bookstore like everyone else, you can use one of the features of the bookstore’s website to expedite your book buying process. This feature allows you to buy your textbooks online and pick them up in the store on campus. There is even a separate desk at the store so that you don’t have to stand in line at the tills and wait for everyone else to purchase their books too. Rather, you just pick up your books and leave.
Another feature on the Campus Books website that can make your life easy is that you can check the ISBN for a previously used book against the site’s database, and it will tell you how much the store is currently offering to buy your book for. This may save some of the stress of having to find a new student to buy your old textbooks, or simply get rid of some of the books laying around from courses past. Carrying on with this feature, if all of these books are located elsewhere, you can mail them to the bookstore for free, and they will then mail you a cheque for the buy-back value of your books. To do this you have to go to the bookstore’s website and add all of the books you are sending back to a list. When you’ve added all of the books you want to get rid of you can print out the shipping information off of the website, package everything up in a box, and take it to the post office. After that you just have to wait for your cheque, which is mailed within seven days of the company receiving your books.
This last feature of the bookstore is one that I’m very fond of. In previous years you would have to call the bookstore or visit them on a regular basis to find out when the textbooks for your courses had been ordered or were in stock. Now you don’t have to do that anymore. Before your term starts you can set up a notification on the website so that as soon as the books have been ordered by your professor the website emails you. You can then go and check out the book’s title, price, and ISBN. For the really frugal student this will help you shop around as you can then look on other websites for cheaper versions of the exact same textbook.