National Text Exchanges
What are these sites? New, alternative ways to buy, sell and "use" textbooks. They all have different features so check out the reviews. Some school's sponsor online text exchanges as well (school text exchanges). User ratings are out of "5." Remember to add your review as well.
- booksoncampus.com
- bookrenter.com
- bookmooch.com
- campusbookswap.com
- madbook.com
- collegebookmatch.com
- titletrader.com
- bookswap.com
- textbookexchange.ca
- collegeswapshop.com
- swooks.com
- books4exchange.com
- textbookexchange.com.au
- whybuy.com
- moreformybook.com
Current Rating: 5.0000
Site allows you to advertise your books to students on your own campus -- no going through the bookstore. So, the savings are significant because you're able to cut out the middle man. In addition, you don't have to spend time and money to send your book to someone, as you would if you used Amazon.com's marketplace. You can meet up with your buyer or seller in the library or on the quad, or wherever, to make the transaction. Site gets bonus points for being well designed and easy to use. Obviously, though, this site will only be successful if many students on your campus are using it, otherwise, you'll never find the books you need.
Current Rating: 5.0000
Site allows you to rent books for a reduced price for varying durations. It's a novel approach. I like it. At the end of your rental period, if you don't want to return your books you're allowed to purchase them, and your previously-paid rental fee is put towards the cost. The downside of the rental thing, in my view, is that you have to keep the book in "like new" condition according to the site, so you always have to worry about fraying pages. You'd probably have to put on one of those paper-bag slip covers like in high school. Also, the site does buybacks and commits to paying you the most for your used books out of anyone on the Web. It requests that if you find another site willing to pay you more for your books, that you send them an email. They will pay you 10 percent more. It's still a pretty new site, and concept.
Current Rating: 5.0000
A new, free site designed to help people trade books of all kinds. You accrue points as you successfully send out books. These points are then used to acquire books. I'm interested to read some reviews on your experiences with this site. Looks like the user base continues to grow. It's also well designed.
Current Rating: 4.6667
Site is run by a branch of the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) that was recently launched. In addition to this free book exchange, they also run maketextbooksaffordable.com. It's a great campaign, and their site also has some useful resources. Currently there are 14,000 textbooks posted on this exchange.
Current Rating: 4.5000
This a new textbook exchange without many books listed yet. They're really trying to get there name out there and the book listings they have are complete and well laid out. They even show you the book requirements for a class at a particular school. The people at MadBooks say it best on their homepage: "the more people that use madbook, the more useful it will be."
Current Rating: 4.0000
Another National Text Exchange without much actual usership. Let us know whether you've had any success with this site.
Current Rating: 4.0000
This site works similar to Switchtextbooks.com. You send in books after your done and accrue positive trading points once someone chooses your material. You can use your points to get material for yourself. I'm interested to get some user reviews on this system of book trading.
Current Rating: 4.0000
This is a very commercial text exchange with a lot of distracting ads that clutter the site, but after a few searches I found that a surprisingly large number of students have posted textbooks. Rate this site and let us know about your experiences with it.
Current Rating: 3.5000
Another big Canadian text exchange. Pretty well laid out and appears that there are a lot of books listed, although the site doesn't give any statistics in this regard. The site charges a 12.5% fee on successful transactions.
Current Rating: 3.3333
The best designed and fastest of the smaller text-exchange sites. I think this may be one of the most promising start-up exchanges, and it's totally free to use their service! I would rank it higher if it had more users.
Current Rating: 3.0000
Site is kind of a hybrid of Net-Flix, Napster and Ebay. It's a novel concept. Here's my abridged summary of how it works: after a free trial, you pay $ 19.99 to become a member. Then, at semesters end, you ship your used books to swooks.com's warehouse and accrue "positive trading points." The number of points they give you is based on how "in demand" your books are, and their quality. You then search for the books you want and the site debits your "positive trading points" for the value of the books you choose. In theory, if your books never depreciated in value in accordance with swooks' value system, you'd never have to buy another textbook again. And while this isn't feasible, the site claims that students save, on average, $362 dollars a year. How much did you save? Rate this site.
Current Rating: 3.0000
This is an excellent Canadian site used to trade used textbooks on campus. The site claims that it has helped over 10,000 students trade textbooks since it was started in 2000. I just posted this as an example of a somewhat successful text exchange.
Current Rating: 2.0000
A really cool looking Australian college textbook site. It claims to be the largest second hand book exchange in Australia, and using it is completely free because it's set up and regulated by Australian Student Services. It looks as if it is well used too. Again, I posted this to show an example of a successful text exchange -- even if it's in another country.
Current Rating: 1.5000
“The Student Revolution Has Begun,” as the site says. But, no it hasn't. This site is unoperational and littered with typos and links promoting other sites. I'm not sure when the "launch date is." The site says July 2005, but July 2005 has come and gone and WhyBuy.com is still a nothing site. Essentially, it claims that it will act as a way for you to trade your old DVDs, CDs, Video Games and Textbooks with other students using their database. There's a link to "TeamWhyBuys" MySpace profile and they have some 26,000 friends, so maybe this will be legit in the future. I'll keep my eye on it, but for now, don't waste your time.
Current Rating: 1.0000
A poorly designed text exchange without any usership that I can see and a lot of ads -- probably the worst site I've seen.
