Bad news everyone. It appears that google friend connect has some trouble with internet explorer. If you are an internet explorer user, please hold tight, as we try to find a workaround to this problem. All of your book reviews and book recommendations have been saved, and we hopefully should have a fix by the end of the week. If you have not tried it already, I also suggest trying another browser like Firefox, which is more secure.

Textbook prices are out of control – however, there are plenty of places online to buy textbooks on the cheap.  Below is a list of places to buy cheap textbooks that have proven useful:

1. BookSpy.net – BookSpy is a book price comparison site.  What this means is that you search by title, author, or ISBN, and get back a list of the lowest prices from dozens of online retailers.  This includes both used and new books.  I would recommend a price comparison site as one of the first places you go if you need to actually buy the book.
2. Amazon, Half.com, Alibris, eCampus
   – These are the major players in places to buy cheap books.  They are searched by BookSpy, but in the event that the website is down, these are the first places I would recommend.
3. Craigslist – Try your local craigslist, a lot of college students sell textbooks via this method.  Moderately reliable, you just have to keep searching every day.
4. PaperBackSwap – Not as reliable, but I did get one schoolbook this way.  Basically you put up copies of your books you don’t want, and you can swap for a book someone else has.  Not very reliable.
5. Your LIBRARY! – Yes, your library.  Most school libraries have stocks of books that are needed for your class, you just need to reserve the copy early.  You can then copy the book.  This is by far the cheapest method.  If you cannot get your book at your library, try WorldCat.org.  It searches all the libraries near you to see if the book is available.  Finally, you could utilize your libraries interlibrary loan system, and request a book be sent.  Most of the time this service is also free.

Book scouting can be a profitable business, either buying for yourself to resell, or working for someone else. The tools of the trade can be quite expensive however, and may put a few first time book scouts off. You may see such tools as hand held bar code scanners that look up the price of the book. These scanners generally come in two flavors, the standalone version (very expensive) or the kind that attaches to your cell phone (less expensive, but still pricey). There is, however, a third option that you may not know about:

You can look up book prices right from your web enabled phone.

If you have internet access on your phone you can simply go to your favorite site and look up the book of interest. The problem with this approach has been that generally, it takes a long time for a web page to load on your phone. Also, if you do not have a phone with a full featured web browser, you were generally out of luck.

At BookSpy.net we have implemented a search feature just for book scouts that alleviates this problem. In addition, most mobile phones with data access should work. Just point your mobile device to http://scout.bookspy.net/ to access the mobile version of our site. You can enter an ISBN, Title or Author and get concise, easy to read results. You will receive the Amazon Sales Rank
, and the lowest prices from a number of vendors including Amazon, eBay, Half.com, Alibris and more. Best of all, as part of our grand opening, we are providing this service for FREE to users of our site.

Hopefully this will help prospective book sellers get up and running, and keep your business profitable!