Welcome to the first day of class. Did you have a good break? Are you excited about the upcoming semester? Are you ready for this semester?

Here are some resources that you may want to check out during this first week of class:

Textbook Buying Guide

2010 Spring Course Catalog

How to Find Your Classroom

UIUC General Calendar

And what better way to start the semester than with an Illini Men’s Basketball game! Tonight at 8PM at Assembly Hall. The Illini will take on Purdue, and the game will be broadcast on ESPN.

Illinois vs. Purdue // Jan. 19 // 8pm

• Live Audio | GameTracker | TV: ESPN
• BUY TICKETS TO THIS GAME | Fan Guide

Go Illini!

The first day of the fall semester is less than a week away. Are you thinking about textbooks? Most students are. Before you go out and spend hundreds of dollars, check out our guides from past semesters.

Amazon.com, Half.com, and Illini Book Exchange are great sources for buying and selling textbooks. All of these websites allow you to search by ISBN and find the book you are looking for. Amazon and Half will ship the book to your door where IBX requires a face-to-face money/book exchange. You may also want to check out the Facebook marketplace.

The Quad: Time to buy textbooks?

Advice: Wait until the second or third class to buy books. You could miss some “used books” bargains, but you’ll save more by only buying books that you need.

The Quad: ‘Required’ College Textbooks

We have all had the experience of over-loading our backpacks with books. I remember as a freshman packing my 10-pound Zumdahl Chemistry book and my 6-pound Edwards and Penney Calculus book into my backpack.

These days of unbearable textbook weight could be over, though, with tomorrow’s expected announcement of a larger Amazon Kindle (“The Kindle DX”). The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the announcement will come Wednesday morning, and the device will be aimed at newspapers and textbooks.

Amazon hasn’t said what the event is about, but the periodicals industry is buzzing with anticipation for the announcement of a larger Kindle. As the Journal reported on April 11, Amazon has been preparing a larger-screen Kindle for some time. Such a device could have several advantages, including better fitting the size and layout of newspaper pages (including advertising) and academic textbooks, which often feature large charts and diagrams.

Digits: Amazon Returns to the Scene of Its Kindle Capers

PC World has even more details, if they’re correct:

The Kindle DX is expected to be optimized for textbooks, too. At least six schools are believed to be involved in a “pilot program” in which they’ll hand out Kindles to incoming freshmen and allow them to get textbooks on the devices. Pace University, Case Western Reserve University, Reed College, Arizona State University, Princeton University, and the Darden School at the University of Virginia are the institutions that have been named.

Amazon’s New Kindle DX: A Complete Primer

UPDATE: “The rumors about the device proved true: It has a larger screen than the Kindle 2, and is aimed squarely at maximizing the newspaper and textbook market.”
Kindle DX: First Impressions of the Large Doc Reader

We have one week left before the 2009 spring semester begins. This seems like a good time to make sure you have those textbooks ready for class. Or does it?

The usefulness of textbooks varies greatly throughout the classes at UI. Some require a book to be brought to class every day, some require no book at all, and many offer an optional book for extra help. As reported in The Quad’s ‘Required’ College Textbooks article, it may be a good idea to wait until the first week of class to see whether or not you want to buy a book. From experience, however, we all know that going to a bookstore during the first couple weeks of class is horrendous. Depending on your study habits and your schedule, you may want to buy those books sooner than later.

While you are boring yourself over Facebook this week, why don’t you do a little research into those textbooks?

The first thing you need to do is determine what books you need for your class. Go to either TIS, eFolletts, or Illini Union Bookstore and search for your class. Book information for each class should be available, if not, the professor has yet to submit the information. Each of these bookstores will offer their price to the new and used version of your books. You can follow their website and reserve, purchase, and have your books delivered. However, it is often much cheaper to use a different source as mentioned in The Quad’s Best place to buy textbooks article.

Amazon.com, Half.com, and Illini Book Exchange are great sources for buying and selling textbooks. All of these websites allow you to search by ISBN and find the book you are looking for. Amazon and Half will ship the book to your door where IBX requires a face-to-face money/book exchange. You may also want to check out the Facebook marketplace. I encourage you to check out all of these options and settle on the best deal, at least, that’s what I usually do

Good luck and please share any book selling/buying stories!