Res Ipsa Blog

Traditional law school wisdom dictates students who want the best prices should buy their books from half.com and then sell them back on amazon.com. There is an even better way to handle books purchases and sales: bigwords.com.

Bigwords.com is a price aggregator that takes into account the condition of books you want to purchase, how quickly you need them, and then searches for the best way to purchase all of your books taking advantage of shipping discounts, coupon codes, and other promotions. It searches sites like half.com, abebooks.com, amazon.com, and hundreds of others.

Using bigwords.com is extremely easy, especially if you have the ISBN numbers for the books you need. After finding the book you want, add it to you bookbag and then repeat the process for the rest of your books.

Now for the good part: once you have added all the books you need to your bookbag, hit “start price comparison.” The site will then search every possible combination of bookstores and provide you with the lowest bottom line, after taking into consideration shipping costs to your location and all available discounts. If you are selling books, it will show you which sites command the best prices.

From there, just follow the step by step instructions to check out from each of the vendors using the discount codes, if any, provided. For a semester’s worth of books, bigwords comes in a couple of hundred bucks lower than the school book store and anywhere from $20 to $100 lower than the prices at a single vendor site like half.com.