Arts & Life

Online resources for CSULB students

The academic year is kicking off and the expenses seem endless. After paying tuition, all the concurring student fees and cost of living, it comes time to buy several expensive books that are only needed for four months and then returned, resold or entirely forgotten in a closet.

One way to save some money on books is to know all the options for buying and selling. For students who don’t like the prices they see at the bookstore, the next move is typically to do an internet search. Oftentimes, cheaper versions of required textbooks can be found on sites like Amazon and Chegg.

Unfortunately, these sites only typically help students save money if they sign up for standard shipping – which means the books might not come until three weeks (and several assignments) later.

Thankfully for Cal State Long Beach students, there is another option. Beach Texty is a website meant for CSULB students to buy and sell textbooks to one another. Beach Texty allows buyers to meet face-to-face with the seller.

Beach Texty is a student-run website, and in the absence of a middleman, the student gets to set their own price. This typically means the seller can get more money than selling back to the bookstore, and buyers can get a fair price on a book they can’t wait weeks for.

Selling a book is simple. Sellers just fill out a single-page form of the book’s information, set a price and post it to the site

It is designed specifically for CSULB students, so users can do a simple search by book title or class. When a buyer finds a book they wish to purchase, they reserve it with a credit card or PayPal account and are given a payment code.

Upon reservation, both buyer and seller are given the other’s phone and email information so they can schedule a time and place to meet on campus. If the buyer wants the book after seeing it in person they exchange the payment code for the book, at which point the reserved money is transferred immediately into the seller’s PayPal account.

Beach Texty isn’t the only useful online tool for CSULB students, though. There are also convenient off-campus housing sites designed for 49ers. CSULB’s off-campus student housing site has an extensive listing of housing options, which can be accessed at csulb.och101.com.

The webpage offers a map of Long Beach, with locations for rent that are easily identifiable as a house, apartment, condo, townhouse, mobile home, room in a home or someone seeking a roommate.

The website also offers a roommate finder that works like an eHarmony for roommates. Students fill out their profile and receive individual suggestions based on the site’s matching system. The webpage calculates a percentage of compatibility to possible roommate candidates.

This academic season, always remember to do a thorough internet search before pulling out the credit card. There are plenty of resources geared specifically to the CSULB student community to help find the best fit.

One Comment

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    CSULB has an online resource for textbooks and related course materials, BeachBookCompare.com through the non-profit University Bookstore. Beach Book Compare allows students to shop with dozens of retail leaders such as Amazon, Half, B&N, Abe, Valore, Alibris, Chegg, and more in addition to our Bookstore. Students get to choose from new, used, rental, and digital options with these leading suppliers. The Bookstore also provides jobs to hundreds of CSULB students and generates over $100k in student scholarship funding each year. Beach Texty would like you to think they are an independent CSULB provider when in fact they operate on 17 campuses in the West. You can see the list at http://texty.studymode.com/. Support your campus, support your fellow students, and get the best prices by shopping at BeachBookCompare.com and the University Bookstore. We look forward to serving you. Go Beach!

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