Armed with her class list for the upcoming semester, graduate student Lindsay Hendricks always treks first to the campus bookstore at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. But if they don't have what she's looking for, Hendricks' next stop is her computer.

There are great deals to be had searching for college textbooks over the internet, Hendricks said. She got one textbook, How to Think Straight About Psychology, which normally costs about $40 for just $5--used--through Amazon.com.

"In graduate college, we're all about cheap books," said the 26-year-old Hendricks.

She's not alone. With textbook prices increasing--by more than 60 percent in the past decade alone, according to one report--students are more frequently turning to the internet to look for deals.

"It's the wave of the future," said Al Greco, a Fordham University marketing professor who follows trends in the college textbook industry for the Book Industry Study Group. And it's a trend that college bookstores will have to answer if they expect to remain in business.

Sales of textbooks over the internet are growing because students have figured out they can save as much as half of the book's cost by shopping around in cyberspace, Greco said.

Traditional book sellers so far are shrugging off the competition.

The sale of textbooks over the internet is more of an annoyance than anything else, said Frank Condello, director of marketing for the Nebraska Book Co., which operates 112 college bookstores and sells to 3,000 bookstores nationwide.

"It's something we have to deal with because it's there," he said. "As to whether or not it's going to drive us out of business, no way."

The internet is being used by some students to buy books, but the biggest competition college textbook sellers face are other stores in the same town and not web sites, Condello said.

It appears that a minority of students are buying books over the internet for now. But some studies show the number of students doing so is increasing.

About 14 percent of college students buy textbooks online, according to a 2003 survey done by the National Association of College Stores (NACS) in Oberlin, Ohio, a trade group representing 3,000 retailers. That was up from just 6 percent in 1999.

A 2004 study done by the California Student Public Interest Research Group found that 86 percent of students have considered buying or selling books at an online book swap, but only 14 percent had done so.

Greco puts the percentage at about 19 percent, but says as students search for the cheapest used book they will increasingly look toward the internet. College bookstores of the future likely will not have printed textbook sales as a significant part of their business, he said.

Internet sales are an issue with college bookstores, but it's not a big concern yet, said Jennifer Libertowski, a spokeswoman for the trade group.