textbooks

Four useful sites for college students

Now that the winter break is over, college students are inundated with work and need to worry again about classes, studying, and tests. So, of course, they'll spend time on Facebook instead. But there are other useful and entertaining sites worth the student's visit.

This is a brief list of four outstanding resources that can help students in college. No student should miss the opportunity to use these sites.

DormNoise If Facebook isn't good enough for college students, they can try out DormNoise, which is another social network designed specifically for them.

DormNoise is centered on a calendar system, which provides students with a visual look at upcoming campus events, student group meetings, and personal engagements. That calendar is the central hub for the site and others can see what students are up to at any time. It's a unique way to connect with others and it actually works quite well to simplify that process and keep abreast of campus events.

That said, the site isn't open for anyone to join--users must be between the ages of 18 and 24 and sign up with a ".edu" e-mail address. If the school is not recognized by the system, you can't sign up for the service. In fact, my alma mater isn't supported by DormNoise. DormNoise should eventually support every school. We hope.

Once I finally signed up for DormNoise with a different address, I found it to be a unique service that will help college students manage their lives. But there's one catch that can't be overlooked: the community is small, which means few people find reason to use it instead of a site like Facebook.… Read more

Save big on textbooks at Chegg

While I sit here rotting--er, working happily--in the Cheapskate Labs basement, the lovely Mrs. Cheapskate is busily pursuing a degree in nutrition. That means lots of chemistry classes, which, in turn, means lots of insanely expensive textbooks. And I mean insanely expensive: for some classes, the books cost nearly as much as the credit hours!

Fortunately, we've discovered Chegg, which allows us to "rent" textbooks for significantly less than buying them new--and, in many cases, for less than buying them used.

For example, when Mrs. C needed Macroscale and Microscale Organic Experiments, 5th Edition, for an organic-chemistry … Read more

Avoid campus bookstore prices with BookRenter

When I was a college student living on a lowly work-study salary, few things angered me more than shelling out dough for a required course book, only to have the professor assign a single chapter for reading. (It's been 10 years since I took the class, but I still remember fuming as I paid $30 for 30 pages in From Max Weber.) And don't get me started on science textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars but only net you a few bucks once the class is over.

Online textbook rental service BookRenter wants to ease at least this … Read more

How DRM can help education

DRM and electronic books could help lower college educational expenses while at the same time improving the health of students.

Here's why: the economics of textbook publishing are broken. There's a reason that an introductory biology textbook costs $125 new, and it's not because it's printed on high-quality paper using a special 12-color press. It's because when the student is done with the book, he or she sells it back to the campus bookstore, or to another student. The publisher is thus deprived of recurring revenue on the title. So it raises book prices, heaping … Read more

TextBookFlix: Cheapish, mail-order text books

Here's a concept for textbooks that's almost as cool as library checkouts. It's called TextBookFlix, and as the name would suggest, it's pretty much like Netflix for textbooks--with a twist. There's no monthly subscription fee, just a one-time fee to "check out" a book for an entire semester. It's kind of a hybrid between the "no late fees" mentality of Netflix, and the loaner system you get with libraries. The service already has more than two million titles available and a search tool that lets you find your books via … Read more

E-book site for students promises to save trees, money

Every June, I am as elated as the next student to have a three-month respite from the confines of school. But, come August, you can find me on Amazon.com, frantically buying an inordinate number of books for every class--in many cases, more than two books per class.

Naturally, my curiosity was stirred upon hearing about a new project from CafeScribe, launched by Salt Lake City-based Fourteen40. The program allows users to buy and download electronic textbooks online. That's nothing particularly groundbreaking, though it could save me some neck and back problems if it cut down on the pounds … Read more