Books can set students back hundreds of dollars per semester, but it pays to shop around. Columbia offers several options for buying and selling back used textbooks.

"Used books cost less than new textbooks," MU Bookstore Spokeswoman Michelle Froese said. "There's an industry standard: they're usually 25 percent less than the new price."

Froese said a student can sell a book back for up to 50 percent of its full price if professors choose to use the book again in the upcoming semester. However, it's also possible for a student to find a book no longer has value at the end of the semester. Sometimes that's due to a professor adopting a book's latest edition and leaving the older version out of the syllabus, but a newer version doesn't necessarily mean the old one is obsolete.

"One of the things with the Missouri Textbook Transparency Act that was passed last year is that professors can ask publisher reps, really, what changes were made to an edition: if it was a really significant change or if it was negligible," Froese said.

If students cannot get any money for the books they're trying to sell back, bookstores recommend holding onto the books, as their value can return in upcoming semesters. Other suggestions include putting the book for sale online or selling the book to another bookstore.

One particular place in Columbia tries to beat the bookstore's prices.

"What we do here is we sell books at an actual market value," Beat the Bookstore manager Eric Pherigo said. "If you go to any other bookstore that's affiliated with the college, they sell all their books for 75 percent of the new price: all the used ones."

Sometimes that saves money, but sometimes the bookstore has the better price.

The seemingly simple task is to find the lowest price and get as much money as possible when selling books back. However, there are a lot of places to look, including online. Web sites such as bigwords.com give you the results from several textbook search engines with one click of the mouse.

Book sellers said use caution when buying online.

"Don't buy it from Joe Student," Pherigo said, "because Joe Student might take two weeks to send out that book. They might not send out the right book."

In the end, doing your own price comparison for each book is the only way to guarantee you're getting the best deal. You can save some money, but that may mean spending a little more of your time.

Several bookstores said the best time to sell your books back is at the end of the semester.

See the links on this page for places to compare textbook prices.