Med Books...Y U SO EXPENSIVE?!

UPDATES: hahahaha, instead of buying them brand new, you can buy them from the upper years, a lot of my classmates are selling their old books. :) 

you can also trysearching on sulit.com.ph for 2nd hand med books, i bought some of them online too, reliable rin yung mga sellers doon. :)

The book alikes are pretty expensive now that i think about it. And from my personal experience. Dont buy all the books just yet. Try to borrow books first and see which ones you like or are more fitting.

P.s. check my other post regarding which med books are usually used during your first year here. :)  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I enrolled last week, and going through several of the buildings, I found myself in the basement of the research center, where a spritely woman was selling our med books.

She handed me a piece of paper with all the books listed on it, with corresponding prices and discounted prices.

Hmmmm. Short list. Not bad. 

Miss..how much all in all?

Wait a moment, I'll just compute it all. Dont worry dear, its all the books for the whole year.

Uh oh. The woman, even though she hadn;t computed it all yet, was already trying to justify the price...

Php 23, 600.00 lang po. 

Poker face. 

Ah, ok po, thank you. I'll come back during start of classes to buy the books. 

Not. I was shocked with the prices. Well, in all fairness, there were like, 10 books, so around 2k each. But I've never bought that many books that totaled that amount, ever. 

So I decided to poke around the internet, look for ebooks, or at least, 2nd hand books that could soften the destructive force that these books would create on my parents wallet. 90% of the books could be downloaded within the day. The other 10%, niet. 

Common sites like 4shared.com, Demonoid.me, and Torrentz.eu were pretty good at finding these little suckers. You can also try typing "download free med books" and a hundred or so sites would just pop up, and provide you with links to several useful med books. 

With torrent sites, you can just type med books, and several torrents are there for downloading. single books are at 20-100mb in size only, while others, the really good ones, are bundled up with about a hundred or so other medical books that are really useful like USMLE lectures, notes, colored atlases, pdfs, and other tidbits.

I found one seller on sulit.com.ph that sold black and white, photocopied versions of the book. at nearly half the price or so. Although its not advisable for some books like colored atlases for anatomy, physio, and neuro, its still a pretty good deal for other books that you just need to read. 

In sulit, they describe it as:

What's a BOOK ALIKE?

♥ Photocopied medical books, hard-bound, covered like the original one BUT are a lot cheaper.

You can read more about them here.

1ST YEAR BOOKS
	VOLUMES	PRICE
Devlin's Textbook of Biochemistry (7th ed)	1	P1520
Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry (28th ed)	1	P1210
Berne & Levy's Physiology (6th ed)	1	P1250
Langman's Madical Embryology (11th ed)	1	P930
Snell's Clinical Neuroanatomy (7th ed)	1	P1050
Moore's Clinical Oriented Anatomy (6th ed)	1	P1460
2ND YEAR BOOKS
	VOLUMES	PRICE
Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Diseases (8th ed)	2	P2350
Basic and Clinical Pharmacology - Katzung (11th ed)	1	P1500
Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (18th ed)	3	P4460
Bates' Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking (10th ed)	1	P1350
Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry (10th ed)	1	P1680
Jawetz Medical Microbiology (25th ed)	1	P1250
Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics (18th ed)	2	P3540
Schwartz's Principles of Surgery (9th ed)	2	P2620
Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (12th ed)	2	P2770
POCKET GUIDES/ COMPANIONS/ “BABY” BOOKS
	PRICE
Pocket Companion to Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology (11th ed)	P700
BRS Physiology	P450
Schwartz Manual of Surgery	P1300
Robbins and Cotran's Pathology Pocket Guide( 7th ed, with markings from original book)	P700
Harrison's Manual of Internal Medicine 17th ed  (2vols)	P700
Sabiston Textbook of Surgery Pocket Companion	P1000
Kaplan and Sadock's Pocket Handbook of Clinical Psychiatry (5th ed)	P950

Compare the book alike prices with this:

Not bad for some, right? I was thinking of different options rather than just buying them all from school since they were all sooooo expensive. 

And so I decided to buy the important ones (as upper classmen advised, the books that are important, are the ones you will need when you review for the boards). so out of the 12 books there, I just plan on buying 6 or 7 of them, and, since I have the ebook versions of the others, I just plan on buying a lot of paper, some black and colored ink, and voila! print my own textbook. 

Why not do it for all the books? Well, it would be a b*tch to just print 1,000 pages. And especially if they;re colored with super detailed drawings of the human body, I cant afford to have fuzzy images mess up with my studying. 

So I plan to print 4 or 5 of the books, chapter by chapter, going with the flow of teaching at school, instead of printing them all in one day. From Php23,600, I whittled it down to Php 14,000. I already have the super fast printer, all I need is the ink, and ink just costs about 350-400 bucks a cartridge. Thank youuuuu HP for being so sturdy and cheap. 

How about you guys?