Oh yes…
Last semester…$450 in books and I didn’t even bother turning them in. I would have only netted roughly $75 from the deal.
You might try renting out your books to acquaintances you can trust. I lent my $60 Norton Reader to two different people for $20 each - they each took it for a semester. Everyone won in that situation: Each of the people I loaned the book to got use of the book for $20, when they would have normally paid $45 or $50 for and resold for maybe $7. I got $40 back on a $60 book - and I still have the book!
Sounds intriguing. Where can I buy a copy of this?
The profs don’t do it, the publishers do it. The profs would love to keep using the 6th edition (for instance), but they’re not being produced any more. The publisher made a 7th edition with the pages and chapters all jumbled to cause just that kind of confusion, because as stofsky goes on to explain, they need to keep kids buying new books.
As for stofsky,
, yeah right. If students stopped recycling books used, all the publishers would do would be to cackle with glee as their coffers got filled even faster.
Okay, so evidently you know more about the system than I do. But it’s hard to believe they’d pass up on an opportunity to just make more money, for free.
At the scam errr school I go to their bookstore has a policy of buying back student books for half the sale price. Of course what they don’t tell you is that it is UP TO HALF, not half. If they already have enough of a certain book or know that its not a popular buy then you’ll be lucky to get 5% of your money back. I actually used a 40 dollar book as a placemat for lunch once because they only wanted to give me a couple dollars for it.
Then there is the time I took an accounting course and bought a $75 accounting book (used) and then the following quarter they changed books for the next class in a series of accounting classes. I then had to pay $100 for ANOTHER DAMN BOOK. They wouldn’t buy back the old and they didn’t have any used books.
I hate that place so much I now either try to buy books elsewhere or share books.
One book I bought came with a cd-rom containing the entire book. Had I been half-intelligent I would have made a copy of the cd and then returned the book at full price.
I really wish I’d kept my virology textbook. Keep the books that apply to your major, kids!! Especially the upper-level ones.
Wouldn’t have worked. Next time, read the little sticker that seals the CD pocket inside the cover; you can’t return a book after you break the seal on the CD. You can only wait to sell it back as used. And god help you if the CD’s missing…
From some time ago:
Half.com seems like a good deal. Seller and buyer can be at a happy medium… I paid about $70 for a $120 textbook. Plus the smugness of not giving the bastards at the bookstore my money.
At my college, there’s flyers all over promoting what seem to be local student-run textbook swapping sites. Keep an eye out.
Google “textbooks” and check out some of the sponsored links. And hell, maybe the students working at the bookstore might have some tips. Ask 'em- I doubt they’ll be losing a commission bonus by telling you.
Oh, one problem I encountered with Half.com- shipping takes about two weeks, which may be too long for a student with an impatient professor.
What I fail to comprehend about this rant is how the book store ends up being the heavy. Try getting your favourite clothing store to buy back the jeans that don’t fit you any more and see how well that goes. The bookstore buys back books they think they can sell again, at a price that makes them a profit. They don’t buy back books that aren’t going to be used again, because they can’t sell them. They don’t sell used books when the edition has just changed because there aren’t any. This is not mean or rude or designed to make a student’s life hell, it’s just common sense.
Rant about the publishers who insist on new editions every couple of years. Rant about the schools and professors who let them get away with that. But the bookstores? They’re just middlemen.
Funny you should mention Barnes and Noble. Their big thing now is college bookstores–my sister, who works for a clothing company that sells to on-campus stores, has remarked to me that it seems every other week they seem to snap up another store. Most of the time, you don’t even know that they own a college book store. Indeed, at the university I work at now, our campus store is owned by Barnes and Noble, but you will see no sign or other marker indicating that in the store.
And for those of you who think the college buy-back program is not a scam: consider that I have seen history texts retailing at two or three times their RRSP in US campus stores, only to go to England to see them being sold at or below RRSP. I would not be surprised to see Barnes and Noble, for example, to sell a history text at a lower price in their main, off-campus stores, and the same text at a large mark-up on campus. Legal, but very troubling.
What do english vs american new book prices have to do with this? Could you clarify?
Not to mention brilliant. Do you think BN really wants to sell books on campus? I’d bet my next paycheck they WANT you to go buy them cheaper at their store. Since the university bookstore is effectively a BN store they can just shift stock to the local store thats moving at regular price. They can slowly but surely get people into the mode of not buying textbooks at the school and then close up shop once 80% or of the textbook sales are happening offsite in a regular BN store. If someone actually does pay the inflated bookstore price…it just ices the cake a bit. If they have you in their store you buy other things too…win/win deal for them.
Where I went to school, the bookstore took almost any used textbook for half the cover price, and sold it for three-quarters. Very fair. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the bookstore was owned by the students’ union, nor did it hurt that there were many, many used-book stores in town, including the textbook exchange across the street from the campus. Ironic, that capitalism should work so well in Berkeley!
Note my location
Not that you were implying there’s anything wrong with Arizona State, were you? 
If that book doesn’t exist I am going to dedicate my undergrad career to researching the topic so I can write it myself. Dude.
Didn’t expect to see this thread again (thought I’d killed it stone dead). There are a number of English history textbooks that are sold both in the UK and in the US. They have an RRSP (recommended retail sale price) for the US, UK, and often a number of other countries. Now, in the UK, you don’t really find many, if any, on-campus bookstores. (Most lecturers expect you to read books from their reading list in the library.) If you buy the book, it’s probably going to be in an off-campus bookstore, and without fail at or below the RRSP. In the US, however, it’s a different story. Go check out the “history” section of a US on-campus bookstore to see what I’m saying.
I have weighed this claim again and again, and, sorry, I still don’t get it. Why on earth would Barnes and Noble want people to buy their books cheaper? That’s like saying, “Well, you could buy a car in your town for $15,000, but the car company really wants you to go over to the next town to buy for $12,000!” What are you saying–that B+N buys up college bookstores as a loss-leader? Trust me, B+N wants to make money from their college stores. They didn’t get to be a huge company by making questionable business decisions.
I don’t see the “get the students to buy from the B+N town stores” as an effective ploy either. Let’s take the situation at my university as an example. The nearest “town” B+N is a 30-minute drive from the college. There are other bookstores closer than this to us. Is Barnes and Noble hoping that our students will forget this fact, and bypass the other stores to go to them? Furthermore, as I previously mentioned, our college bookstore does not like to advertise the fact that they are owned by Barnes and Noble. (You will see large signs referring to “your college bookstore,” but the only sign in the whole place that refers to “Barnes and Noble” is the one at the register telling you who to make the check to.) Surely, if B+N was interested in drumming up business for its “town” stores, it would be trumpeting the fact that it owned our store, and advertising its “town” store.
As I said before…Barnes and Noble isn’t buying campus bookstores because they don’t want students to spend money in them. They are buying them because they are a huge source of profits. That is why, as Cecil Himself once said, they are a multimillion dollar industry, and you and I are insignificant insects.
No. Ill rant about the bookstores thank you very much. The school makes a MASSIVE amount of money off of me already in tuition which is highly overpriced. When I can buy a book online, brand new, for 80 bucks, with shipping, and the same book is $110 bucks at the school bookstore, there is something wrong here. The online bookseller is making a profit as well, so don’t act like they are selling at cost. Campus bookstores just take advantage of the situation and are overwrought by their own greed.
Fuck em.
I went to college in the Stone Age (graduated in 1970), but even then the scam was on. I had some professors who were in sympathy with the students and just put things on reserve at the library or had you buy cheap paperbacks; had one prof in sociology that actually copied everything (yes, they had copiers back then ), and handed it out…never even had to buy a book.
I agree with this totally. I did my undergrad degree at a rather underfunded state university in Australia, and despite the university’s constant need for more income they didn’t screw the students by having a rip-off bookstore. During my first two years, the bookstore was one of a national group of co-op bookstores, and a $15 fee got you life membership and 12% off the cover price of all books. After my second year, the co-op was replaced by a university-run bookstore that gave the same discounts to any student, staff, or faculty member of the university.
Fast-forward to my American graduate school, which is a very wealthy private university charging its students somewhere in the realm of $27,000 a year for tuition alone. Despite all its income from tuition fees, alumni donations, residence halls rental, etc., etc., the university still cannot provide its community with a decent bookstore. Our bookstore is a B&N, which sells books at the regular B&N rate, and sometimes is even more expensive than off-campus B&N stores. There is no discount for being a student, and the store is also often slack in ordering books on time.
The store has a buy-back policy which works similarly to the system described by nametag:
I’m not quite as impressed by this system as nametag is, because (at my school, anyway) the price they charge for the used book is the same whether the book is in pristine condition, or whether it has marginalia and highlighting all the way through it. I think that charging three-quarters of the cover price for a book with dog-eared pages and some other student’s illiterate scribblings all over the text is outrageous.
And you would think that, when it gives an outside bookstore a contract to operate on campus, the university would at least attempt to ensure that the students’ needs were met in the most basic way. But that doesn’t happens. About 5-6 weeks before the end of each semester, the store sends all unpurchased textbooks back to the B&N warehouse, leaving students who haven’t yet bought all their books in the lurch. Because a full semester’s worth of books can easily add up to quite a few hundred dollars, not all students can afford to buy all their books at the same time at the beginning of the semester. But those who try to stretch their income out by purchasing books as they need them get fucked over by the bookstore’s return system.
I do think that the university is just as much to blame for this as the bookstore. Everyone expects B&N to be a profit-driven, inconsiderate behemoth that doesn’t really care about its customers, but universities should be places where the needs of the students and faculty come before those of the corporate bookselling establishment.
Yes, they do, because believe it or not, they’re in business. The one or two students taking their time buying books–whether for financial reasons or laziness–aren’t worth the thousands of dollars in stagnant inventory, nor are they worth the dollar/square-foot ratio that the mucky-mucks look at. Returns are a long and difficult process, what with counting inventory, packing properly, finding the best wholesaler to sell to, doing the paperwork, [Yul Brenner]etcetera, etcetera[/Yul Brenner].
Not to mention that if you couldn’t find next semester’s books on the shelves because they were still trying to get rid of last semester’s books, you’d have a fit about that.
Anyone wonder why I left being a text buyer? It’s a motherfucker–too many new books, too many used books, too expensive, not enough money for buyback–it’s as though the students expect the bookstore to be there as their lending library or leasing company, rather than a business. Lord forbid businesses such as bookstores and publishers attempt to make a profit rather than run into bankruptcy for the benefit of the children.