South African online retailer Loot has kicked off a sale on its selection of university textbooks which are aligned with local schools.
The sale can be found here and, from looking around, it seems it’s a decent offering.
The highest discount we saw on the page was a whopping 39 percent which is great but, of course, students and parents aren’t buying books by whatever has the highest discount, but instead by whatever their school requires for studies.
Another factor here, aside from price, is availability as the 2022 academic year is starting soon. A great-priced book doesn’t help if it’s going to take a few weeks to be delivered.
Under the “add to cart’ option on Loot, and as well as the details page when you click on a product, check to see if the item is labelled as “in stock” or not. Those not in stock will be given a different label indicating approximately how many working days it will take to ship.
As for delivery Loot gives it to customers for free for orders over R400. Given the insanely high price of textbooks, this should be an easy threshold to reach.
While we’ve highlighted Loot because of their sale, it should not be the only place to shop.
Universities will provide a directory of suggested and support book resellers when they provide the list of required books to students. It’s worth looking around these stores – as well as the university’s own store – to see if books can be found for less.
When considering these brick and mortar stores also remember that many of them buy back used books, which is a decent way of getting a discount for students past their first semester.
We also highly recommend that students consider digital versions of their textbooks. These are usually priced the same as physical books with the downside that they can’t be sold after use and sales on these digital versions are few and far between.
The benefits, however, are massive time saves when it comes to creating personal study notes and searching out specific information for projects.
See our dedicated feature story on the benefits of digital books here.
