Can you use an older edition of a college textbook instead of the newest one?
Frank asked:
I enrolled in intro to criminal justice. i looked up what the book was for last semester at my college, because what book would be used for this coming fall semester was not available yet. so i ordered already the 11th edition. but now there is this new 12th edition textbook available that the college said i need, and it is SO EXPENSIVE. i wonder if i really need to worry about getting it, or if it is useless to get. i bet the same information is in this older one
This entry was posted
on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Higher Education (University +).
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I enrolled in intro to criminal justice. i looked up what the book was for last semester at my college, because what book would be used for this coming fall semester was not available yet. so i ordered already the 11th edition. but now there is this new 12th edition textbook available that the college said i need, and it is SO EXPENSIVE. i wonder if i really need to worry about getting it, or if it is useless to get. i bet the same information is in this older one
January 13th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Its difficult to say it’s a chance you will have to take.
I did it with my past STAT class. The information was the same as well as the HW probs, but it was located in different parts of the book as well as some words were changed.
Overall though, I’d go for the older version, and if you have to burrow the newer version from a friend. Bwill
January 15th, 2010 at 8:26 am
Most classes are fine with that, but you should shoot the professor an e-mail to see how he integrates the text into the class. Depending on how much he uses the textbook it may be necessary to get the most recent edition. JV
January 18th, 2010 at 6:06 am
usually FUNnCRAZY
January 18th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
You might want to check with the college library. If they will have the new edition available you can probably get by. Mary
January 19th, 2010 at 7:51 am
Depends on the professor. Ask him/her if your edition is good enough. In most cases, it will be. However, in some classes the more up to date ones are going to work to your benefit, so be careful. jiayo23
January 20th, 2010 at 1:46 am
You can, but edition does usually matter, especially if your professor specifies an edition. They don’t change much from edition to edition usually. They usually change things like page numbers and the order of the information within the textbook. While you may find a previous edition for cheaper the problem comes when your professor assigns questions 1-10 on page 100 and you do them, but your questions in your edition were over different material or were just different questions and you end up with the wrong answers. This is the reason you should always try to get the edition that the professor specifies. I know that the newer editions are usually more expensive, but that’s why I use They are a textbook search engine that searches all the online textbook retailers to find you the best price. You can even specify whether you want to search for used, new, or both kinds of textbooks. It’s pretty cook actually. They also just came out with an iphone app that makes the searching even easier. J. Scott