College is expensive. It isn't a secret. You'd be hard-pressed to get anywhere without accumulating thousands of dollars worth of debt. Classes cost tons of money. Parking costs money. Lodging costs money. Textbooks cost money! Everything is ridiculous. But it's not all bad. There are resources that will help ease those severe wounds to your wallet. My favorite penny saver is a website called thriftbooks.com.
Now, now, I know we all have reservations about "A great new site that will save tons of cash right now!!" But Thriftbooks is the real deal. Imagine going to the bookstore, grabbing two textbooks you need for some of your classes, and finding out the bill is less than ten bucks? That's literally how Thriftbooks works. This semester alone, I bought seven books from them in bulk (I have a lot of reading to do this semester, as I mentioned yesterday). It cost me $36.50. For seven books. That's barely five dollars per book! Specifically, most books you'll need for class will specifically be $3.59, but the really expensive ones will be twenty bucks!
Another thing about this site is that you're buying all of these things. You're not renting textbooks for hundreds of dollars. You're buying them for dirt cheap. So if you don't want to keep Moby Dick when you're done with it (which, I'll be honest, I definitely will keep), you can sell it or give it to a friend when she takes that class. It saves so much money it's absurd.
The only caveat to this whole thing is that these are all used books. You're certainly not grabbing hardcover textbooks off the press for printing price. You're buying used textbooks that are good enough to still be reused. The better shape a book is in the more expensive it'll be, I admit, but I've never bought a book for more than fifteen dollars on this site. If you spend over twenty bucks on a single purchase you get free shipping, and for every fifty bucks you spend on the site you get a five dollar coupon. That coupon pretty much equates to a free book! I don't even understand how this website makes any money with how cheap everything is!
I use this site for whenever I buy any book. Admittedly, it doesn't always have the specific book I need for every class. But if it doesn't have the ninth edition of the Volume C of The Evolution of Geography (which is probably the real name of a book I'm not going to bother to look up) then I'll probably just buy the closest thing I can find on the website. If the seventh edition is going to make the professor go under a frothing rage, then fine. I only wasted five bucks buying that book.
In any case, school textbooks aside, I actually use this site for basically all of my reading needs! I bought an entire series of books I had already read just so I could give them to people for borrowing purposes! My biggest problem with this site is that it can be very dangerous for people that habitually buy books. I won't name any names, but if you know anyone that reads so often they'll pick up a book because it's cheap or the title sounds cool, maybe you shouldn't give them this site. They could end up spending a hundred bucks on buying a new library. You've been warned.