Emily Chan

With the Fall semester coming to a close, the last thing you want to think about is course curriculum; but as the weeks tick by, your spring semester professors will start posting their syllabi and along with it, a list of their required texts. In recent years, the prices of textbooks have only gone up. Universities are catching wind of the price gouging and have taken steps to help ease the burden on their students.

Here at Penn State Abington, and all Penn State campuses, professors often put a copy (or sometimes several) of their required texts on “reserve” at their campus libraries. Not all professors do this, but if they do, you can ask your librarian to take a book out that is “on reserve.” The librarian will ask you for your Penn State ID and the name of the course before bringing out the textbook. You’ll be able to sit in the library and use it for up to two hours. If you need more time, you can ask the librarian for an extension; but you can’t leave the library with the book. If you don’t have time to go to the library and sit down with the textbook, you might be able to find the textbook in the library and request to check it out, like at your local library.

Some professors may offer their required texts for free using an ever-expanding open resource website called ROAM. The site started in 2007 by the College of Earth Minerals and Sciences as a way for professors to create free open use sources for their students; but is largely open to any Penn State faculty/professors. Using a Creative Commons license, professors are able to create their own required texts. The sources on the ROAM website vary widely in topic and range from articles to guides, created by Penn State faculty and free to use by all (even students from other universities, or the average Joe).

Penn State has also been rolling out additional filter options on LionPath to find courses which do not require any texts (or texts that aren’t free/provided by the professor). Read more about this in a separate article by Emily Lang, here.

There are of course affordable options for finding textbooks as well. Renting books from Amazon or the school bookstore can be convenient and oftentimes much cheaper than buying the book outright. It can be a gamble to rent a textbook though, there’s never much solidity in the condition of the book you’ll receive. If it doesn’t bother you, then renting is a great choice. It’s hard to beat free, but renting textbooks can be more cost effective than buying them. If you’ve had to buy them though, Penn State bookstores offer to buy back textbooks if they are recent and/or in good condition.