I know how difficult that can be, because I'm a student too. The main reason why I opened this website (or to be precise, a blog) is to share some of my (good) experiences with you.
As I mentioned before, I know how boring and exhausting is to look for textbooks. The fastest way to find the textbooks you need is looking on the Internet. I know, I know, it's also the easiest way to get screwed and, unfortunately, I learned it the hard way. But we learn on our mistakes - or in your case on some others mistakes :-)
After deep searching on the Internet, and losing a lot of money, I finally found couple of online marketplaces for books:
Abebooks.com - I didn't put Abebooks on top of the list just because it starts with the letter "A", I put it on top of my list because it's simply the best. I'm one of their happy customers for couple of years now and they never disappointed me.
They have cheap prices for both, new an used textbooks, their shipping is super-fast and reliable, they have more than 100 million titles and they often offer discounts (as a matter of fact, they're offering one right now!). You can also sell your books and get the money back.
Phat Campus - this is also one of my favorites. They also have fast shipping and cheap prices for new and used textbooks but they also offer one cool service - BuyBack! They are willing to buy used books from you, and from my experience, they're often offering pretty good deals. I once bough a book for about $100 and after one year of using it I sold it to them for $85!!! You have to admit that this is more then a good deal!
