1-take your schedule to the school bookstore and make sure you know the specific section of the course you are in. For example, you may have Eng 103-01 or Soc 101-04. The section indicates what class you are in and what professor is teaching the class. Sometimes each section requires different books so it is very important to know this information. The way it worked in my school was the books at the bookstore were organized by course name and number and then by section, so you’d just find your books that way.

2-The other option is to just wait until you get to class and the books you need will be listed on the professor’s course syllabus. From experience, I have noticed that sometimes a professor will list a book as required before you get to class (because they submit their book lists way before the start of the term), however once you get to class they may decide that a certain book is either only for reference or supplemental material or sometimes not needed at all.

It is important to note a few things in regards to textbooks:

Full title of the book(s)

Author and or publisher of the book(s)

Year published

Edition (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc).

Another important piece of information you may want to get is the ISBN number. This is a universal coding system for all books (not just college texts). It is usually on a bar code on the back of the book. It will definitely be useful if you want to purchase textbooks either online or at a place other than the college bookstore (which is highly recommended if you want to try to save some money). Also, sometimes campus books stores do run out of textbooks for a specific course and they have to be reordered, so this may be a good time if that happens to look into alternate sources of finding the book. This is especially important in reading intensive courses.