Buy my Books!

What McGill saves you in tuition fees; it rips you off in books and merchandize! Most McGill students are often swopped up into the crazy whirlpool that is first week. Every professor begins telling you to rush to the McGill bookstore and buy all your books as soon as possible, because without them – you’ll fail. Well, let me tell you now, that that’s all rubbish.

I remember not buying a single book for any of my classes for the first two weeks. As you know, the first two weeks are the add/drop period. You get to attend any class and choose whether you want to keep it or drop it. It’s honestly pointless to buy your books during this time, because you might end up dropping the course. Instead, buy your books after the second week, when your sure of your classes and when some sellers are really desperate to sell.

McGill Classifieds

This site was really the best place to buy books from. Sellers are extremely desperate to get rid of their books and the best part is that you can bargain. You basically go through the list with your CTRL+F on and search for you book. You’re bound to find at least three to four McGill students selling the same book. You can then choose which price/buyer/edition you like the best, arrange a meeting with the student and then go ahead and buy it. The best part is that the whole transaction is very casual and informal. http://www.mcgill.ca/classified/books/ that’s the link. There are tonnes of other stuff as well, like bikes, laptops, cars, etc. You’ll get the prices here.

Editions

Where most professors especially get you, is the edition of the book you have to buy. I remember for Math 141, our professor kept telling us to buy edition 6 of the calculus 2 book, which went out for 180$. The funny thing was that all the previous five editions were exactly the same, different page numbers, but the exact same sums. Edition 5 was about 130$; Edition 3 was about 50$ and Edition 2 was 10$! Can you imagine the rip off? So check carefully whether you really need the latest edition, because you can save hundreds of dollars with the aggregate sum of your total book purchase.

Amazon

Remember that Amazon is your friend and with eBay, you can get amazing prices. I didn’t use either site for my books, but what a couple of my friends did was order in bulk and split shipping charge. They sent about 20$ a book plus 6$ shipping. Not much, considering the original price of the book was some 140$. Though the only drawback is that if it’s second hand, you don’t really know the quality or state of the book. Talk to the seller online and make sure the book is in decent condition.

eBooks

This is what I did all through my 3 years at McGill. I downloaded my books! Mostly every book is online and you can download it or buy the eBook. They’re much cheaper and what you can do is split the price of the book between your friends and then distribute the copies. It’s completely legal and it’s amazing! Why? Because you can walk into six classes with one laptop and have all your six books on it. You can search for keywords or sums in seconds rather than scouring the entire book, reading line by line for a phrase or definition. The only problem – don’t do this for art courses or management courses where there’s a lot of reading, because your eyes burn out of their sockets reading online. You can print it out if you want, providing you can print really cheap.

Scanning

Another good idea is to scan your friend’s book. What I found is that your courses never require the entire book as part of the curriculum. Usually, just a few chapters are covered. For some of my math courses, we only covered 4 chapters from a book with 53 chapters. So you’re wasting your money buying the whole book. Instead, just scan the parts you need and print them if you want. It’s a bit tedious but provided there are only a few pages, you save a lot and it’s a one time job to scan and print. You have plenty of time during September, so you can do that then.

The Word

Lastly, there’s a shop called the word. It’s near the McGill campus and it’s on the way from New Residence. You get second hand books there and you can even sell your old books at decent prices. Prices at this place are a bit higher than the ones above, but definitely lower than the McGill Bookshop. You get almost every book you’ll need at McGill here, but not all. I won’t talk about the McGill Bookstore here, because I honestly think they rip you off tremendously.

Copy EUS

If you’re lucky, most of your books can be bought from Copy EUS, the Engineering McConnell shop. It’s right next to the front door and books are about 20$ to buy here. Being an engineering student, I luckily had to buy most of my books from here. 20$ is amazing for such big books, plus they were bound and had hard covers, so it wasn’t just a stack of lose pages. I know MIME 310 and Mech 201 have books at Copy EUS, as well as some other courses like Natural Disasters.

I hope this helps, just remember that you’re in Montreal, where you can get anything, so shop around before getting scammed! Also, remember that worse comes to worse you can always go to the McGill bookstore and get your book there! Happy Book Buying!