A wise man once told me that girlfriends are expensive. I asked him whether he'd ever met my textbook.

"This 300-page beaut," I said, "costs 200 dollars."

Suddenly a date to the local movie theatre or ice cream shop didn't carry the same weight. I felt like I'd shattered a world view.

Textbooks stare inflation in the face and never blink. And unlike with most college "expenses," students often feel they don't have a say in the matter.

But a movement is starting – albeit very slowly – to lighten the load on students' wallets every fall and winter.

On a congressional level, there is the The College Opportunity and Affordability Act, passed in February, which among other things forces publishers to sell "bundled" items separately and fully disclose prices to professors before inking a deal.

And on a less-bureaucratic level, there are alternative textbook purchasing options sprouting up all over the place. Check out the following three options, including our recommendations for each:

Now if you plan to keep your textbook after you finish the class, renting probably isn't for you. But let's face it: Almost all of us have visited our school's "Book Buyback" tent only to find out that our 185-dollar textbook is now worth 5 bucks. Renting can get you out of this situation.

2. Cheap Textbook Buying

Yes, "cheap" and "textbook" can go together in the same phrase. Check out Campusbooks.com if you are looking for used textbooks at reasonable prices. Old standbys Amazon.com and Half.com can also deliver the goods.

The key when using this option is to plan in advance, and plan well. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to buy expensive books before attending the first class (unless your professor has explicitly told you that you'll need a certain book or two). When ordering online, you'll have to account for shipping time; so make sure you aren't stuck without a book two weeks into class and facing a quiz the next day. Be prepared to order right after your first class.

3. Textbook Borrowing

If you're looking for the most economical option, you've found it. If you can, find a friend or peer who has taken your class before and ask to borrow the book. Offer to buy them dinner or get them football tickets in return. And if you don't know of anyone offhand, use Cramster's Facebook app Courses 2.0 to facilitate the process (you can enter the textbooks for each class you list).

Really though, some enterprising student should start a business on his/her campus that pays fellow students a flat rate to be a "lender" and then charges "borrower" students a certain amount per book to rent for the semester. Seriously. Do it and let me know how it goes. Maybe we can be partners.

What strategies to you follow to save money on textbooks? Have a favorite Web site you go to? Do you think government can really rule against big business and noticeably lower prices? Post a comment below!

How to "fight the fade" during terribly boring lectures.

One minute your eyes are locked-in on your professor and you are taking notes. The next minute, your hand is slowing as your eyelids are being forced down involuntarily. The next minute, your head is making its way backward, ready to bottom out on the notebook of the kid behind you. Suddenly your slumberous motion startles you awake and you are primed to repeat the process.

Easy to describe because we've all done it before… and seen it done by the kid next to us countless times more.

Some start to snore, some appear severely hypnotized, some seem to be doing subconscious calisthenics and some look like Pauly Shore when… well, whenever.

So how to avoid this most common of classroom fates?

The key is to keep yourself involved somehow in the lecture. Taking notes doesn't qualify because you are simply regurgitating information instead of actively processing thoughts.

The best advice I can offer is to ask a question. It doesn't matter what the question pertains to, as long as it can be linked to the topic at hand and doesn't make you look like a kid who has zoned out for the past 10 minutes (or past 10 lectures).

Anytime you have to present yourself to the professor, you'll need to stay awake. It'll keep you alert and give you the stimulation needed to make it through another energy-sapping lecture.

If that still doesn't work, you can always fall back on electroshock therapy…

What helps you stay awake in the most boring lectures? Strategies or tips to share?

Why attending class is the simplest step toward getting the grade you desire.

I was giving a tour around campus to a class of elementary schoolers last week as a "first exposure to college." Surprisingly it was a real fun tour to give… astronomically better than touring around a grossly disinterested middle school group.

I'm still smirking about the point in the tour when the kids realized attending class wasn't mandatory. You would have thought five UFOs just did a fly-over, Blue Angels style. At that point, their teacher made sure I reiterated why going to class was important.

It never gets old listening to classmates brag about their abysmal attendance record. I still can't think of an "accomplishment" that requires less action than missing class. But when kids brag about it, they make it seem as if it was a Duke Nukem-esque effort to oversleep five days in a row and not care.

Truth is, there isn't an easier variable to solve in the equation of achieving good grades than attending class. There's a popular saying that the brain must be exposed to something three times before it becomes truly "locked in" or understood. When you apply this theory to academics, it makes a boatload of sense.

You hear your teacher lecture about a completely foreign topic in class. For unity purposes let's pretend this topic is integration by parts (my guess is most all of us have taken or are taking Calculus). When the teacher goes through it for the first time, the concept is still fairly foreign, but at least you know what the goal of the process is.

That night you attempt some homework problems dealing with integration by parts. They are tough, so you go back and reference the chapter reading. Exposure No. 2. You complete the homework and now know enough to tell your parents what exactly it is you are doing in class. 

Finally, review time comes around and when your teacher or TA goes through integration by parts again, it all makes sense. There wasn't a lot of effort involved and you certainly didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary to understand it – you simply took the easy route.

Now imagine all of the kids sitting around you in that review session who were learning about integration by parts for the first time. You'll be catching up with TiVo that night while the lucky ones will be on Cramster making up for lost time.

Bet you aren't regretting struggling through that 9 a.m. class now, huh?

Are there certain subjects where attending class is more important than in other subjects? What are the biggest benefits of regularly getting yourself to lecture?

Laptops are increasingly popular in the classroom, but are they best for taking notes? 

Alright, so here’s a topic that I admittedly don’t have much to contribute to: Is it better to take notes the old fashioned way (in a notebook) or is it better to take notes on a laptop?

For the purposes of the classes I took freshman year, a laptop was great. I type four times as fast on a laptop as I can write on paper. Being a freshman I also thought it necessary to take an exorbitant amount of notes to cover my bases. Thus, laptop note taking was the way to go.

But, alas, as I returned for my sophomore year, my laptop’s battery life was a whopping 48 minutes. That gets me through half of a class if I’m lucky. By spring semester my computer had juice for 29 minutes. How my laptop still operates, even when plugged in, is beyond me.

So paper notes it was from that point on. And although I could not surf ESPN and Facebook while in class, paper notes suited me just fine.

My hunch is that different areas of study are more conducive to different styles of note taking. What’s the best style for you? Why?