{"id":917,"date":"2016-11-20T22:49:17","date_gmt":"2016-11-20T22:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/sagestudents\/?p=917"},"modified":"2022-02-01T19:11:36","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T19:11:36","slug":"to-buy-or-not-to-buy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/sagestudents\/2016\/11\/20\/to-buy-or-not-to-buy\/","title":{"rendered":"To buy, or not to buy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Multi-buy Bundle<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cAs if! Two-hundred pounds for a couple of text books?\u201d<\/em>\u00a0was, as I recall, my initial reaction as I read the email from the School of Psychology. The email detailed a package deal on textbooks that was being offered to first year students; \u00a3199.99 for 5 psychology text books, saving me around \u00a338 in total. The list of books included: An Introduction to Brain and Behaviour; An Introduction to Social Psychology; How to Design and Report Experiments; Discovering Statistics using IBM SPSS Statistics; and, How Children Develop.<\/p>\n

I looked the books up on Amazon and to my surprise I found that a few of them were actually being sold for more money second hand than new, meaning it would be cheaper to buy the package deal offered by the university. Nonetheless, two hundred pounds isn\u2019t an amount of money that I could easily justify spending – even on textbooks – and while I\u2019m not one to turn down a decent saving, I eventually decided it would be best to wait until I got to Uni and find out how necessary the books were to the course, before I decided whether or not to buy them.<\/p>\n

It is only recently, however, that I revisited the dilemma of whether or not to buy the text books. We\u2019re eight weeks into the term, and I have been managing to get by without them fairly well. There\u2019s the library for one, which has copies of a lot of the text books. But, aside from that, there are around 380 people doing psychology this term so most people are bound to know someone who does have a copy of the textbooks; more often than not, I have found people are willing to let me borrow theirs for a short while, or at least to send me pictures of the pages we need to read.<\/p>\n

\"book\"

My copy of the textbook<\/p><\/div>\n

Even if that wasn\u2019t the case, a lot of the material we are required to read are articles which are provided online, and it\u2019s only in the last few weeks that we\u2019ve been asked to read passages from one of the text books – \u2018An Introduction to Social Psychology\u2019 by\u00a0Miles Hewstone,\u00a0Wolfgang Stroebe and Klaus Jonas – hence why I have been forced to revisit the to-buy-or-not-to-buy situation. Despite having access to the textbooks when I desperately need to, there are downsides to not having your own. For starters, I don\u2019t have instant access to them, meaning that if I need to do some emergency \u201812 am the night before a seminar\u2019 reading, I don\u2019t have the means of doing so. It is also a lot harder to make notes and get a clear understanding of the text when you are reading from a picture off of your phone.<\/p>\n

After a lot of deliberation, I eventually decided that implementing an \u2018as and when\u2019 policy was probably my best bet – the thought of spending \u00a3200 in one go was too much for my tightfisted brain to handle, even if it wasn\u2019t necessarily the most inexpensive option. I decided to start with buying \u2018An Introduction to Social Psychology\u2019 from Amazon and then purchase any other books I may need further down the line. I thought I\u2019d treat myself and buy a new copy as it was only a few pounds more than the 2nd<\/sup> hand one (ah – small luxuries), and having recently signed up to Amazon Prime Student for a 6-month free trial, the postage and packaging was free and the book arrived the next day! Even if you take nothing else away from this post, I would say that whether or not you decided to buy your books on amazon (if you decided to buy them at all), \u00a0I definitely recommend that you try out Amazon Prime Student, even if it’s only for the free trial*. As well as free delivery and discounts, you can also stream music and videos for free – what more do you need?<\/p>\n

*Side note: if you do decide to try out Amazon Prime Student, and don’t want to pay after the 6-months, then make sure that you cancel your subscription before the trial ends!!!<\/em><\/p>\n

Share this:<\/h3>