Buying Law School Textbooks

I will skip any discussion of non-legal methods of acquiring textbooks. I’m not for inducing copyright infringement.

Used or New Books?

Your budget will likely make this decision for you. If the professor provides some sort of bound material, or the book has a yearly supplement, you’ll likely pay full price for those. However, if you have the option between used and new, here is what to consider.

New Books: nobody has badly highlighted it. If you take good care of it, you can sell it online for a higher price. Drawback: new books really break the bank.

Used Books: generally better priced and can be had for really cheap online (I’ve bought some for under $10). Drawbacks: battered condition. Questionable highlighting: an A student, a D student, or four C students. Sometimes entire pages are uselessly highlighted in yellow. You get less when reselling your book after the semester, but if you paid pennies for it, who cares?

Where to Buy

You have quite a few options. School bookstore (online or on campus), Amazon (and Amazon Marketplace for used), eBay, eBay’s Half.com, AbeBooks, or other online resellers. Personally, I wouldn’t waste too much time trying to make a decision over a few dollars difference in price. Just remember to check what the shipping prices are and if you have to pay any tax.

If you buy from the campus bookstore, you know that you’ll get the right books. However, these days it is trivial to find your casebooks online. The dilemma with buying online is that you might not know the proper books to buy with enough time for shipping. You can always be a bastard and buy the books from the campus bookstore and then return them when your ordered-online books arrive. Double and triple check the bookstore’s return policy before trying that. And don’t mark up the books either.

Knowing the Books to Buy

In order to buy online, it is best to know the ISBN for the books that you need.  Different editions of a book will have different ISBN so if you know the one you need, you are safe. For some books, you can generally know the author, title and edition. Try to get the ISBN as it uniquely identifies the book.

To get the ISBN, you might be fortunate if your campus bookstore actually shares that information through their website. Otherwise, you have to go to the actual bookstore and write the numbers down. (They will generally be on the bar code on the back of the book but double check that against the ISBN printed in the first few pages of the book.) What I usually do is take a clear picture with my cell phone camera.

After Purchasing

You have required courses for the first few semesters so you won’t have the option to drop a class. Thus, you likely won’t have to worry about marking up your book and causing a problem with a return.

Your course might have a casebook supplement. More than once I’ve had that listed at the bookstore but the professor never used it. After you get your syllabus, look through the reading to be sure that the supplement is used. If it isn’t, ask your Professor if he or she will assign any reading out of it. Play the poor college student and hope that he or she will tell you that you can return it.