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[BFEL]

So this is something I'm fully expecting to be nigh-impossible, but I have a decided lack of full-on college possibilities, so I have decided to look into well...just buying the books

I know this is hardly a substitute for the full experience, but its the best option I can come up with at the moment, so does anyone know where I could buy these? I've looked online but my google-fu is pretty terrible to be honest.

I won't be surprised if this is unobtainable, given that higher education is essentially a business monopoly these days, but hope is being held out.

[Parsely]

You can buy e-books for around 20 bucks online nowadays on Amazon (which is awesome and dirt cheap), but usually they won't be available for every single class you're taking. If you're not sure where to buy your books in the first place, check your college's website. You can also look for people selling their old books for pretty darn cheap on craigslist and similar websites. Renting and buying used textbooks from the bookstore can save you hundreds of dollars as well.

You don't need to be taking college classes to buy books from their store.

[Vector]

.

[gimlet]

If you're buying texts on your own, remember you don't need the absolute latest (EXPENSIVE) edition that the actual college course mandates, you can buy the much much much cheaper slightly older editions.

Plus you know you can view or even take a lot of college-level courses online for free -
https://www.edx.org/
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
https://www.coursera.org/
http://academicearth.org/
etc

Presuming you're in the US look for stuff like:
https://www.tuition.io/blog/2013/01/5-ways-to-go-to-college-tuition-free-or-really-cheap/
which included a couple of new programs I hadn't heard of before.

Also if you either read on your own or take the free online courses, you can still often find a way to get college credit for that later - check with ALL your local colleges/universities to see if they let you get credit by testing.  If they don't have in-school tests, almost all will accept CLEP tests which cover  quite a few of the low level courses.  Most schools won't quite let you get a degree entirely by testing (the killer is "residency requirements" - make sure you know those.  That's not "where you live" but "how many courses you sat through in that school".)  There are definitely schools that WILL let you do it, some googling shows:
http://hechingerreport.org/content/testing-way-degree-faster-taking-conventional-route-much-much-cheaper_16407/
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/01/14/testing-out-how-to-moneyball-your-way-to-a-debt-free-college-degree/
for a start.

Good luck!

 

[Knight of Fools]

Here's a custom google search engine for ebooks, which most open and free books have been converted to. From my experience most are just open source and/or out of print editions, but there's potential for non-legit copies out there if you're worried. If you don't have an ereader like a Nook or a Kindle, you can download Calibre and convert any ebook files to PDF with it. Just print it to PDF.

This Reddit post is also a potentially useful resource. It's a collection of ebook resources focused around textbooks, but you're entering potentially shady territory. I haven't used it myself.

If you're worried about non-legitimate downloads, most of the things you'll find in those resources are outdated, out of print, or just flat out free but there might be some questionable ones. If you're just looking for textbooks in general and not the Latest and Greatest for your current semester of college you should be fine. Specific titles is what you need to be careful with.

[jefam99]

this is a list of books available from the bookstore at savannah technical college, you should be able to buy most of them on amazon.

http://campusshop.savannahtech.edu/savtech/

[pisskop]

There was a website an foreign student gave me that I forgot, to buy these books from another country.  Ill repost back if I can find the name again.

[Parsely]

* GUNINANRUNIN upends a bin full of textbooks over BFEL's head.

[Tiruin]

Try to find bookstores that give student discounts for the textbooks? I'm reporting from a Philippine situation--also try e-books or related pdf files to the subject matter [associated with the syllabus], perhaps?
^{If all fails, try Amazon.}