posted on Aug, 26 2011 @ 09:23 PM
Just wait, at my Community College Calculus books are over $200 and if you go to a real school think about selling your stereo. I have a couple
shelves of text books that cost me well over $2000 that are just collecting dust. Last semesters books cost just under $700 for 5 classes, When I went
to go sell them back I was offered less than $100. I figured I might as well keep them for reference of if a friend needs em. The best way to make
your money back is to hope they are using that text again next year and sell it to someone who is taking the class. I almost made my money back on my
Mandarin books that way. However, for books that are all worksheets I dont think my advice below will help, but for regular text books its great. Not
sure if its kosher though,
A somewhat time consuming way around that is utilizing the schools library.
If you have a digital video camera (the higher resolution the better) and preferably a tripod you can save a lot of money.
Every college library I have been to has at least one copy of each text book that you can check out but cant leave with.
You can set up your camera on a tripod and have it look at the book, I have found that using the Negative setting works really well for trying to take
pictures of print, since most cameras arent really designed to focus on lines of text. Making the text white and the background black works well for
documents.
set your camera to record then turn the pages one by one. In a couple minutes you will have the entire book on video. Then put that video on your
computer and use any video editing software and you can go through frame by frame and save each page as an image, then you can put all those images
together in a PDF, then you can put that PDF on a laptop or PDA or Ipad or anything and you have the book. you can even print out pages if you need
to. Takes a couple hours of your life and you need some hardware/software to do it, but it will save tons of money.
edit on 26-8-2011 by
Smiddy because: Sometimes I suck at typing