How to Get Through College Without Buying a Textbook

Anyone who's been to college knows that the cost of completing your assigned reading can get pretty absurd. The average student spends about $1,200 per year on books and supplies, according to The College Board. With that type of money, you could finance your next spring vacation or several months of rent.

Going through college spending very little or no money on textbooks isn't just a fantasy. A surprising number of people have cheated the system and worked their way around buying books. Here are some tips from education experts, regular, thrifty college students, and alumni on how to avoid dishing out more funds on top of your already unreasonable tuition.

For many students, the solution to having to buy expensive textbooks is hiding in plain sight. The campus library, where you might already go to study, is also a source of all kinds of literature. You can almost always get novels, anthologies, and other non-textbook books from the library. There's also good chance you'll be able to find the textbooks you need there, albeit sometimes in older editions.

Even if your own school library doesn't have the book you're looking for, its website may let you order books from other schools. You can pick them up and return them to your own school library as you normally would.

Hannah Rose Schonwald, a geologist in Phoenix, Ariz., went through her entire senior year of college without buying a book just by checking books out from her school's (and other nearby schools') libraries and renewing them when they were due. Kumba Sennaar, a master's student in biotechnology at Johns Hopkins University, managed to get through college spending under $1000 on books the same way.

One of the easiest ways to avoid buying textbooks is to borrow them. The trick is to make the arrangement mutually beneficial so nobody's mooching off anyone. Zara C., an academic coordinator in Pittsburgh, saved herself and her friends money on books through her Quidditch club. Students started leaving books in the club office for others to use and soon, Zara and her friends had a collection of the reading materials for many of the school's most common courses.

Harry Potter doesn't have to be your thing for this to work, of course. Any student group—even one solely for this purpose—can be a huge help. Erica Latrice, author of 100 Ways to Conquer College, got access to free textbooks through a study group. She also made deals with other students in her classes where they'd each buy one of the required books and share them. Erica recommends holding book parties where everyone can bring texts they no longer need or posting flyers when you're looking to exchange books.

If you don't know anyone to work out a deal with, you can always try asking professors, teaching assistants, or older students to borrow copies of the books they don't need. If people don't want to part with their books for an extended period of time, BeSmartee co-founder and vice president Arvin Sahakian had success asking peers to lend her their books for a day and making photocopies.

This won't necessarily work for every book (at least not legally), but some books—or at least parts of them—are available for free online. Michael Jacob, a Managing Partner at Onlineresumebuilders.com, used Google Advanced Search to locate specific phrases or pages in different texts. SEO strategist Jess Herbine uses Google Books to preview pages and sometimes entire chapters of books.

Certain books will even have entire PDF versions online. Amelia Roberts, a registered nurse in Washington, D.C., would search "site:.edu [name of book or topic]" to see if the book she needed was available. Leah Thomas, a writer in New York, says virtually all the plays she had to read for her theater classes popped up in a quick Google search. Alexis Monroe, who has made it to her senior year at the University of South Carolina while spending only $100 on books in the process, uses Bookboon.com to search for free PDF versions.

Many college bookstores provide the option of renting books rather than buying them. This works pretty much the same way as purchasing a book, except it costs less money and you return it at the end of the semester. If your school doesn't provide this option or the cost of the rental is still high, there are several independent rental services. Sennaar used BookRenter.com and Jasmine Goodwin, a small business owner from Tacoma, Wash.–who bought fewer than 10 textbooks during college–used Chegg.com, a subscription service that's like Netflix for textbooks.

If you need to be frugal and are okay with only hanging onto a book for a short period of time, there's also the option of buying a book and returning it. Jacob would purchase books right before exams and then return them the day of the test–after he'd have the chance to cram.

However much a book costs at your campus bookstore, chances are there's a cheaper version of it on Amazon. In addition to hard copies, Amazon has an eBook Library for Kindle and Fire tablets that'll save you up to 60 percent on books if you buy them and up to 80 percent if you rent them.

There's also a number of lesser-known, cheap places to buy textbooks. Dylan McKee, a higher education coordinator in northwest Indiana, uses bigwords.com to search for the cheapest editions of books. Abe, an engineer in Santa Barbara, used half.com to buy international, coverless versions of books for about one-tenth the price offered at his school bookstore.

Stephen Slota, an educational technologist and game designer from Hartford, Conn., doesn't believe textbooks are always necessary. Often, he says, they just say the same things you learn in class. Online forums and massive open online courses (MOOCS) on sites like Coursera and Khan Academy provide free reading material, so if you don't want to buy books for a class you're taking, you can see if there's a MOOC on the same topic. Although it may have a bad reputation, Slota says, "Wikipedia has become increasingly accurate as time's gone on, especially in the hard sciences."

Youtube is another great resource for tutorials. Roberts would type phrases like "how to find the mean absolute deviation" for explanations of concepts you might normally rely on textbooks for.

Given all these cheap or zero-cost alternatives, there's no reason why you should ever have to shell out hundreds of dollars just to get through a college course. It might take some time to strategize, but the thousands of dollars you'll save by the end of your four years will be worth it.