Money-Saving iPhone App #12: BIGWORDS

I’m headed to my college reunion this weekend at the University of Virginia and let me tell you, I wish BIGWORDS was around back when I was in school. If you’re not familiar with BIGWORDS, it’s a price-comparison search engine for college textbooks. So basically it finds the best textbook deals for you in seconds. Imagine how much money I could have saved!

Okay, so it’s too late for me, but not too late for you if you’re taking college classes or if you have a child in college. And of course, BIGWORDS has a free app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which searches 20+ different sources for the best deals for you.

Just enter the ISBN number for the book you want to buy and BIGWORDS will show you where you can get the book at the best price. If you don’t like the result BIGWORDS pulls for you, you can choose to not see results from a particular seller or you can bypass a particular copy of a book (e.g., maybe you want one in a better condition).

BIGWORDS will even show you textbooks that can be rented for a period of time. Or, you can have BIGWORDS not show you these rental results at all. You can even sell back books through this service. It’s pretty amazing, and a huge money-saver on text books. It’s great too to be able to look up books while you’re in the campus bookstore to make sure you’re truly getting the best price!

Have you tried out the BIGWORDS app? Let me know what you think. And don’t forget to check out all of the posts in my 30 Days of Money-Saving Apps series.