A college education (and even more, the “college experience”) costs a lot of money. One of the most bemoaned college-related expenses is textbooks. Every quarter or semester, students trudge through their local bookstores and shell out hundreds of dollars for the heavy, price-inflated compendiums of glossy photos, useless asides, and (maybe) small slivers of information.

The pattern of behavior is always the same: the students scan the bookstore shelves for cheaper, used editions (perhaps $70 a pop instead of $100). Some classes require multiple books; some classes require ten. The students carry the stack of texts to the counter and pony up hundreds. In class, the books may never be used- it’s impossible to tell when they will actually be relevant.

Later, these students gather the books up and try to return them to the store for a pittance (maybe $20-30). Often a book is not returnable because it is an “old edition”- a new version has just come out, with minor updates such as a new cover photo and a table with a new layout. Next quarter, everyone will be buying the full-priced new editions.

The textbook industry is a racket. The books are made unnecessarily expensive, for they are puffed-up with frilly nonsense. My school drove up the price of Psych 100 textbooks by requesting a special “Buckeye Edition”; the only difference was a black-and-white photocopy inserted into the first page, which acknowledge the student reader as a member of Ohio State. It’s a hose.

Last year, however, I realized that I never really need to pay for textbooks. For the past four quarters of school, I have not laid a cent on a bookstore’s counter. As I see it, there is no reason for any student to ever pay for textbooks, ever again. Here are my simple steps to attain free textbook access:

1. Use the school’s library. This may sound obvious, but many students appear to neglect their school’s massive collection of books, scholarly articles, videos and other class supplies. About two-thirds of the time, my textbook search stops at this step. The school has the books I need. Most universities similarly maintain large archives of books.
2. Use the school’s within-state interlibrary loan. I can borrow texts from any university library in the State of Ohio, with as much ease as I can borrow a local book. Right now, I have books from Oberlin College, The University of Akron, Muskingum College and Marietta College sitting on my desk. Most schools allow their students to search the entire catalogue of all the state’s college libraries with ease, and book are shipped promptly and picked up at nearest on-campus library. It’s actually easier to request these books online than it is to walk to the nearest bookstore.
3. Use the national interlibrary loan. Every now and then, I can’t find a book in either the university or state-wide library search. When these two methods have failed, I can usually find the book via my university’s membership to a national interlibrary loan. I imagine that most universities belong to this program, which is called Illiad. There are more restrictions to this borrowing program- for example, I cannot renew indefinitely- but the program has stilled helped me access hard-to-find books.
4. Can’t find the hard copy? Use Google Books or Google Scholar. Google Books lists detailed information about nearly any book you have every encountered in your life. Of these listings, a sizeable percentage features the option to read through excerpts of the book on your computer. Sometimes, you can read the entire book online, for free! I’ve used Google Books to track down difficult-to-find political science texts and other research books. Google Scholar provides access to scholarly articles from journals and books, and is also helpful when trying to track down a specific study or author.
5. Never pay for literature. Project Gutenburg provides access to just about every short story, novella, poem or play of literary merit. If a writen work is decades and decades old, or if its author is dead,you should not be paying to read it.  I took an English course this quarter, and the department was asking around $50 for a thrown-together book of poems and stories from the 1800’s. I simply googled the title of each poem and found it with ease. I downloaded short stories via Project Gutenburg onto my Ipod Touch and read them like ebooks.
6. If the above don’t work, use the local library. I have never had to resort to this step. I’ve always found the books I needed either online or through my university. However, if my previous options had failed, I would have searched the Columbus Public Library system. The library is not just a place for the homeless to access the internet, no matter what cultural prejudices have told you. Don’t take the amazing service that libraries provide for granted.

These steps have saved me between $200 and $300 a quarter, or nearly $1000 over the course of a year. I only wish that I had noticed the potential of all these tools earlier into my college career. There is no reason to pad the wallets of the textbook industry; it is a broken system that savvy consumers should avoid.