Students have a range of options for purchasing textbooks for their courses. Cost is a significant factor for students in making their textbook selections. This leads many students to seek out used and older textbooks for courses. However, this is often fraught with risk. How much do texts change from one edition to the other? How does this affect testing? etc. This is often hard to keep track of. What follows below is intended to minimize the potential problems for students that may arise in selecting textbook options.
Buying Texts Online
Online sellers are great. You can find almost any book you need from an online seller and it can often be much less expensive than at the local bookstore. While this is great for those for whom money is the first and only object in buying texts, students are encouraged to remember that there is a non-monetary value to your local bookstore that no website can replace. Local business serving local people are an important part of vibrant communities and it is often worth an extra couple of dollars to support your local bookstore.
Having said that, many students have chosen to use websites for their textbook needs, especially to find used copies. While this has many benefits, it has some significant pitfalls that you should consider:
How much can I save?
This varies a great deal from book to book and on on when you order it. August and January are the big seasons for booksellers. They sell lots of books in these months and they know that the demand for these texts will be higher during these periods, especially for the common textbooks. Prices in these periods will be higher than at other times and you will have many other people looking for the same texts at the same time in many cases. Depending on the text you can save a great deal, or you can end up saving nothing at all.
When will the book arrive?
This is probably the biggest issue when ordering used books on the web. Depending on where the seller is located, their sales volume, and other factors, your text can take as long as 4-6 weeks to arrive. This can especially be a problem from sites like Abe Books that have overseas merchants listed (1). While you may get the book half off, is it worth it if you don't get the book until the week of the first midterm? Be careful to check on where the seller is. Also check to see if they sell very many books and what their ratings are. Also look at whether they offer expedited shipping. This can often be only a few dollars and can significantly reduce transit time. It is important to remember that professors don't care that you got the book for 75% off when they assign readings. You are expected to do the readings when assigned and there will be precious little sympathy if you didn't realize the seller was in Bangalore, India and the book is in a shipping container in the middle of the Pacific Ocean the week of the midterm because you picked "Postal Service" for shipping. Just be careful when you look at the seller info and this one is easy to avoid.
What book is it?
Whenever possible, search by ISBN. ISBN is edition specific so you know what you are getting. On many used book websites a big chunk of the sellers are people like you and not professional booksellers. This means they are not experts on the books they are selling. I have gotten hard-cover editions that were listed as soft-cover editions (which is good) but I have also gotten the wrong edition, the soft-cover instead of the hard-cover, and once I even got an audio book. First and foremost: read the descriptions carefully and know what they are selling. Second: Look at their customer service ratings - if they only have a few ratings, what do they say? Avoid sellers that have repeated negative ratings. Lastly - know the policies of the site you are buying from. If the seller misrepresents the item, what are your options. 99.9% of sellers are honest and they will usually fix the problem. That .1% can be a pain in the rear end, but you can often get redress from the site. Of course that doesn't help you in the course, so be sure to follow the first point above (know what you are buying).
Its a different version, will that work?
This is a tough question. Let's face it, book publishing is a business and publishers don't want you to buy used books since they make no money from them. So there is a lot of pressure to publish new editions frequently. Often the differences from one edition to the other are small. At times, however, they can be extremely important. If you are in a class on American Foreign Policy buying the pre-911 textbook is a bad idea. On the up-side there are ways to check just how much a book has changed. #1 Get the ISBN numbers for all the texts you are comparing. #2 Find out who the publisher is. #3 Go to the publisher's web site and check out the table of contents of the different editions. Most sites at least give a brief list. Professors can usually see the detailed table of contents but not all sites will give students the same access. If the table of contents has big changes, then the older copy will be a problem. (Example: One of the most common readers for IR courses was almost the same for four straight editions [one or two articles changed out of nearly forty] and then after 911 that reader changed nearly half the articles, making the new edition so different that older editions were not usable. You could use the 1988 edition in a class in 2000, but you couldn't use the 2000 edition in a class in 2003.) So the nutshell version is that you never really know whether or not an older text will work well or if it will be a disaster without doing some poking around.
Can I sell my book back via these sites?
The answer is yes and no. The vast majority of sellers are selling you the book and you can't sell it back. You do have the option of setting up a seller account and selling your books back that way. It is actually pretty simple to do. The problem is that you will be selling your book at the wrong time. You will most likely want to get rid of it at the end of the semester, but the people who want it (students) won't buy until the start of the next semester. If you hold onto it for a little while you can get more for your money. It may just be easier to sell it to the campus bookstore.
Listed below you will find a guide to textbook alternatives for the readings currently assigned in my courses for the current term.
For the record: It is recommended that all students purchase the current editions of the texts. These are the versions from which all assignments and tests will be drawn. Choosing any edition other than the most recent may negatively affect your grade even potentially to the point of failing the course. Books in greed are recommended, not required.
POLS1101
| Ginsberg, Benjamin, Theodore J. Lowi, and Margaret Weir We The People, 7th Shorter Georgia Edition | The 6th edition of the text (9780393179132) will work for this course with no problems | |
| The 5th and earlier editions of the text start to have some problems, especially with contemporary issues. The basic "three branches" information has not changed, but the other information has shifted over time. These editions are not recommended | ||
| Non-Georgia editions of the text are the exact same texts, only without the section on Georgia. There will be some test questions from the Georgia sections, so use the non-Georgia versions at your own risk | ||
| The "with policy chapters" version. This is the longer version of the book. It includes additional chapters related to policy. The non-policy chapters in the long version are the exact same chapters that appear in this version of the text. The longer version will work just fine for this class. | ||
| Miller, Roger LeRoy, Daniel K. Benjamin, and Douglass C. North The Economics of Public Issues | 15th Edition (ISBN: 978-0321416100) is the most current version of the text | |
| 14th Edition (ISBN: 978-0321303493) is similar to the 15th Edition with only a few articles different and can work for the course | ||
| 13th Edition (ISBN: 978-0321118738) is a few more articles different and will have a few problems, but it is still workable. Anything earlier (12th Edition and before) are not recommended |
POLS3501
| D'Anieri, Paul International Politics Power and Purpose in Global Affairs (ISBN: 978-0534521356) | This book is brand new (2010 copyright) so there are no previous versions. An ebook is scheduled to be available "by the fall" but is not available at the time this page was updated. |
| Mingst, Karen, and Jack Snyder Essential Readings in World Politics | 3rd Edition (ISBN: 978-0-393-93114-3) This is the only edition that should be used. |
| Allen, John L. Student Atlas of World Politics | 8th Edition (2007) (ISBN: 978-0073379722) |
| 7th Edition (2006) (ISBN: 978-0073401461) can also be used | |
| Editions prior to the 7th Edition become increasingly out of date and should not be used | |
| Art, Robert J. and Robert Jervis International Politics: Enduring Concepts and Contemporary Issues | 9th Edition (ISBN: 978-0205642724) |
| 8th Edition of this text (ISBN 978-0-321-43603-0) will also be fine | |
| Frieden, Jeffry, et al. World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (ISBN: 978-0393179576) | This is a brand new text (2010 copyright) so there are no previous versions. |
| Griffiths, Martin, et al. International Relations, The Key Concepts, Second Edition | (ISBN: 978-0415774376) This is a text that gives concise explanations of concepts in international relations. It is a handy guide to the terminology of international relations. The first edition (ISBN: 978-0415228831) will also work just fine as a basic guide. |
| Barrass, Robert Students Must Write | (ISBN: 0415358264) This is the text that I am assigning for all my upper division courses that discusses how I want the written material in the course to be presented. It will be used in the context of the course paper and to a lesser extent in the take-home exams. |
POLS4501/5501
| Shaw, Malcom International Law, 6th Edition (ISBN: 978-0521728140) | The 6th edition includes significant updates to trade and environmental law which makes the 5th edition a little out of date. The bulk of the core information is roughly the same, so you can get by with the 5th edition, although you will have some trouble answering some of the later discussion question sets. |
| Armstrong, David, et al. International Law and International Relations (ISBN: 978-0521605182) | This is the only edition, so no older one's are out there. |
| Ku, Charlotte and Paul Diehl International Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 3rd Edition (ISBN: 978-1588266279) | The 2nd Edition (ISBN: 978-1588261328) is different enough that it may cause some problems. It has the same conceptual coverage, but the articles are different. The 3rd Edition has been updated in a number of important ways so the 2nd Edition can work, but may cause some problems on the exams. |
| Barrass, Robert Students Must Write | (ISBN: 0415358264) This is the text that I am assigning for all my upper division courses that discusses how I want the written material in the course to be presented. It will be used in the context of the course paper and to a lesser extent in the take-home exams. |
(1) You can eliminate this problem on Abe Books by filtering for US only sellers