Textbooks - eBooks?, rental/sell back?, new/used?

[candynut]

Here's a related grad school question, but at least a minor distraction from Decision 2015 for you.

 

What does everyone like to do about textbooks? Do you buy new and keep forever? Have you tried eTextbooks? Do you sell back?

 

I've always bought used and sold them back at the end of the semester. But for my stats class I had to buy a looseleaf book that was brand new and I could never return. Expensive, but it was nice to have no other marks in the book and so fun to take notes right in the margins that made it super easy to study (my teacher followed the text pretty closely). Usually I'm really careful to keep my books in great condition so I can sell them back.

 

I think I would like to keep my grad books for reference, but they take up so much space and there is always new research coming out that will outdate old texts.

 

I would love eTextbooks for the searching capabilities (so often I remember a phrase that I need to find and I can remember where on a page the phrase is, but I can't find the right page!!), and just because it takes up no physical storage space on my bookshelves or in my bag. But, I don't love reading on a screen.

 

Anybody found their textbook sweet spot?

 

 

[landshark]

Reading on a screen can be a pain unless you have the right kind of screen.  I find the kindle paperwhite very easy to read, but the ipad i had was awful for reading on.  I was reluctant to start collecting ebooks instead of real books, but with limited space for real books, I decided to try e-books.  Now I only get real book copies of things I know I want to have later on.

[MonicaSLP]

I hate etexts. My stats class is using one and it's so hard to flip back and forth when trying to figure something out. I buy and return, through amazon when I can. Keeping them is usually silly because things change over the years and by the time you graduate different things are important to you than when you're just starting out. I do make a copy of any pages that really might be important later, like a good chart that's hard to find online.

[jgconforti]

As a follow-up question, are there any post-bac books that I should take with me to begin my grad program? Will I need them as references, or will the texts for my grad classes suffice? I'd prefer to sell the texts I currently own, but I'll certainly keep them if I will need them.