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A new college year has started, which means most of us need some new books (often quite painful for our wallets ), so what have you bought yet or which books do you still have to get?

50 euros is not too bad . I once thought it would be convenient to buy books in the beginning of the year, which resulted in not needing 2 out of 6 or 7 books or so, so 70 euros could've been spared, but those books are nice and sometimes useful nevertheless For the start of this year I didn't have to buy books yet, but I need some for the next block. Till now I could manage with the PDFs we got and books from previous years.

Some books I need are The Archaeology of Syria, Climate Change in prehistory and 'Domestication of plants in the Old World: The origin and spread of agriculture'. Of which the cheapest costs about 18 euros and the most expensive about 66. Last year I had to buy a book on Geochemistry, which cost 85 euros. Till now my most expensive book, and I hope it's also the last really expensive one . But I did use it quite often, so that was quite ok.

Pdf files are really convenient . It would be nice actually if schoolbooks would end up in digital format (apart from hardcopies of course), so you could use your pc or an e-reader and don't have to carry 3 kilo of books with you (I have 2 books that weigh about 3-3.5 kg itself xD, so you're really unfortunate when you have to bring these books with you )

For lecutres I usually still use a college notebook (so in this case handwriting for the win ). In the first 2 years I didn't have a laptop yet, and in the 3rd year I was still used to do lots of handwriting. And besides, if I'd start using a laptop for that, I'd be using pc's way too often, so it's a sort of self-protection (apart from the fact that laptops do have their pros).
For my handwritten notes I've got a system now that works for learning and such, and I don't learn as good from a pc

So in short, despite the usefulness of laptops, I still prefer handwriting . And my laptop is currently at the shop for repairs, so I won't get it back untill 3-6 weeks

Seems that handwriting wins typing till now in this topic At my uni there are also still only few who use laptops during lectures, with a maximum of 2 (out of ~60) in each lecture.

@ Wit: your system sounds quite convenient. Our uni doesn't really bother how you get to read the books, or if you read them, as long as you pass the exam . But sometimes a bit more help could be wanted. For example at the start of this semester it turned out all 60 master students needed the same book, but only about 5 were present at the shop, and only one in the library. In most of the (online) stores, the book wasn't available for a few weeks, so we would end up with quite a big problem. But fortunately there were some students kind enough to copy the book to pdf.