Forgot part…
<SNORT> What color is the sky in your world?
Sigh.
If you read my post, dimwit, you’ll see that i specifically said that i never expected the booksellers to act any differently. What i was trying to say was, given the way that stores like B&N act, they shouldn’t be given contracts to run university bookstores. You’re correct that bookstores are businesses and that they are not there to be lending libraries for students (or children, as you so idiotically and patronizingly put it); but by the same token, neither are universities there simply to provide a regular and guaranteed stream of income to fuckwad book chains.
And, with reference to your point about not being able to find next semester’s books on the shelf - what a fucking joke. We’re lucky if the next semester’s books are on the shelves a week before the semester starts. From the time they send this semester’s books back (5-6 weeks before the end of semester) to the time they put the next semester’s books up, the textbook shelves sit virtually bare for weeks on end. And surely, with regard to the “dollar/square-foot ratio that the mucky-mucks look at,” its just about as inefficient to have shelves sitting empty as it is to have them stacked with books that people might actually buy.
What are you implying here? Are you simply trying to point out that many universities don’t act this way? Or are you saying that they should not even be expected to act for the good of their students?
If the former, you are correct, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to get them to live up to a higher standard of behaviour towards their students and faculty.
If the latter, you’re an idiot.
Buy online! I’ve had good success with bookcentral.com and with half.com. I also regularly buy books that are one edition old, since they’re usually the same book with different typeset and pictures. There are some subjects that just don’t change. Besides, I can’t come up with $1,000 every year from my crappy summer jobs just for schoolbooks.
I’m sorting through my books this month. I haven’t decided if I want to cart them all home then sell on half.com or if it’s worth it to me to sell them to the bookstore cheap just so I don’t have to lug them home. I’m also vaguely considering just leaving the ones I’m not planning to keep in a pile on the campus sidewalk.
mhendo, might I suggest that, since the end of the semester’s near, you go apply at the bookstore on campus. Chances are that they’re taking temp employees because they’re busier than a one-armed paper hanger trying to do returns, do buybacks, and order next semester’s books at the best ratio of profit margin/new/used to keep the students, professors, and mucky-mucks happy. Spend a little time having to worry about your profit margin, and see how little you care if your “standard of behavior” is “higher.”
Let’s pretend that you’re not an economics major–well, I’d say you’re not. Textbooks are a small market. A publisher won’t sell nearly as many copies of a freshman composition book as, say, Stephen King’s latest logorrhetic monstrosity. As such, in order to pay the writer, the editor, the printer, the binder, the shipper, the bookseller, the employees, etc., the price per book is higher. Buying in volume gives higher discounts (viz. B&N superstores running indie bookstores out of business) and textbooks just don’t have the volume to make $20 or $30 books profitable for anyone.
Nobody’s trying to screw students–the publisher I worked for was very interested in updating new editions to cover the latest information in the field (admittedly, it was medical publishing, which changes often) and tried to balance cost versus profit–but bookstores are for-profit operations, and that’s called (ECON 101) capitalism.
You mention that you’re in graduate school. Great for you. I expect you to take a lesser offer of salary if and when you start teaching at university so that the needs of the students come first. Really, if you take a salary cut, then tuition might go down.
Or you can admit that you haven’t taken the time to research the textbook industry and you’re blowing smoke out your ass.
Dimwit.
You’ll have to forgive me if i happen to repeat anything i’ve already said. The problem i’m having is that i can’t work out whether you’re an intelligent person who’s deliberately and obtusely misrepresenting my position, or just a moron.
I’m well aware of the financial pressures under which publishers and bookstores work. But at no stage in my previous posts did i say that the behaviour of the B&N bookstore on my campus was irrational or incomprehensible. In fact, i specifically stated that “i never expected the booksellers to act any differently” than the way that they do. All i can surmise is that, in your desperation to demonstrate your erudition by using “logorrhetic” in a sentence, you missed the point i was making.
It is true, as you say, that bookstore like B&N are for-profit concerns. I need no lessons from you on what constitutes capitalism. But, in case you missed it, universities are NOT for-profit enterprises, and it was the university’s policy of contracting out to bookstores that i was most concerned with. I was concerned that the university, in an attempt to maximize its income rather than provide the services that its fee-paying students have a right to expect, was negotiating less-than-ideal contracts with the booksellers. In fact, i believe the university should use its leverage as a “consumer” (or at least a provider of consumers) in a tight market to insist that B&N offer better rates and a more reasonable buy-back system. B&N could then, using the logic of the free market that you are so enamoured of, decide whether or not running the university bookstore is a viable enterprise.
If B&N decided not to participate, the university could then ask for other expressions of interest, or could even choose to run the store itself as a non-profit enterprise. If my underfunded, disorganized state university could do it while offering 12% discounts to students and staff, then surely a rich private institution could manage to make a go of it.
Further, the university should make it clear that if B&N wants to operate a capitalist enterprise in a free market environment, then the bookstore should not expect to be protected from competition. But this is exactly what happened a few years ago when a local independent bookseller wanted to rent some off-campus space owned by the university in order to operate a used bookstore. He promised that he would by used textbooks from students at the university, and would offer better rates than B&N. The good folks at B&N decided that such competition was inimical to their interests, and rather than attempt to compete on an equal footing in a free market, they put pressure on the university not to rent out space to the independent bookseller. The university caved, despite the fact that its contract with B&N did not guarantee exclusivity for the chain on campus.
Again, in case you missed my point, the main thrust of my critique here is aimed not at B&N, which simply behaved as we would expect of a rational actor in the marketplace, but at the university administration. It’s not a matter of this school being short of money, but simply that it is seeking to take in even more moeny in an area where income should take a back seat to service to students. I also blame the students themselves. If enough of us kicked up a storm about this issue, then maybe the university would be moved to do something about it next time B&N’s lease/contract comes up for renewal.
And on the issue of faculty taking pay-cuts, i’ll make one general comment and one comment specific to my own situation.
Firstly, the high tuition levels at private universities is often not indicative of high faculty salary levels. The American Historical Association did a study recently showing that the pay differences between historians in private and public institutions was negligible, and that at some levels of tenure public schools actually paid more.
Personally, one of my career aims is to get a job in a state university - whether in the US or abroad - because i quite like the idea of having a career teaching students who haven’t had to fork out $27,000 a year in tuition.
Maybe I’m assuming knowledge and not giving enough background. On the whole, publishers set retail pricing on books (both text and mass market), and sell them to the bookstores at anywhere between 25% to 40% off, depending on quantity and the publisher (not including special deals), but generally 30%. The bookstore orders what they think they’ll need for new textbooks, and adds to the supply from their own stock of used books and used books bought from wholesalers. Anyone selling under the publisher’s retail price is taking the extra discount against their margin (as a loss-leader or for whatever reason) or getting a better deal for some reason.
If the bookstore knows for certain that the book will be used next semester, they’ll buy it at 50% of the new price, because when they sell it at 75%, they make a bigger margin. In other words, if they pay $70 and sell for $100, it’s 30%. If they pay $50 and sell for $75, it’s 50%.
It’s a very difficult field in which to make a profit, and being able to buy in bulk through central warehouses increases profitability, which is why the B&Ns and Folletts are increasingly taking over from the student coops and mom-and-pops. Follett, in fact, owns its own used book jobber, which often ends up increasing the prices students get paid–they’re not using that book on this campus, but we need it for that one–and though public universities are non-profit, they can’t be run at a loss either.
I wonder if that entrepreneur could have rented a space not owned by the university. Here in a major SEC university town, we have a main campus bookstore leased by B&N, another off-campus run by Follett, and two others independently owned.
I apologize if I seem snarky at times, but this is an issue I’ve dealt with from all sides–and I do mean all. I’ve worked for a mall-chain bookstore (under two different owners), an independent local bookstore, as textbook buyer and assistant manager for a university bookstore, and as a textbook salesman. I’m also ABD and taught freshman comp for eight years, five of those selecting my own textbooks (at one school), and three of them serving on the textbook selection committee (at another that used blanket adoptions). So, you see, I’ve been the student, the professor, the bookstore guy, and the publisher rep.
It’s a low-margin business that depends on volume (compare to, say, jewelry, which often has 200% or more in margin), and one that is much more complex than students often realize.
I went to college, so I know about bookstores. I knew people that bought a book, copied it, and brought it back.
stofsky, I appreciate your analysis of the bookstore business, but I’m still not sure why college bookstores are considered “low-margin” businesses. As I mentioned before, my sister works for a company that supplies college bookstores with licensed clothing. The profit margins on those clothes are very wide–her company sells T-shirts, for example, at three or four dollars apiece, and the bookstores sell them on for…well, name your price. Same goes for doo-dads like license-plate frames, Christmas ornaments, you name it. (She used to work for a company that supplied those, too.)
In-town bookstores like B+N and Borders survive, and indeed prosper, on book margins lower than in campus stores, and they do not have the luxury of selling profitable college-licensed products. So, again, I don’t understand why you consider college bookstores to be “a difficult field to make a profit.” Maybe from the textbook end, yes, but not as a whole.
And one other thing–if college bookstores are generally unprofitable enterprises, why is Barnes and Noble snapping up so many of them?
One solution might be opensource textbooks. Profs and other authors rarely make any significant money off their books. The folks how make the cash is the publishers. Technology now exists, however, to cut the publisher out of the loop, more or less.
Opensource text books are still a rarity, but they do exit. Someone at my alma mater wrote Quantum economics, an open source econ textbook. I have also seen a precalc text used, but have never seen it online. Although they don’t have textbooks particularly, Archive.org has a collection of opensource books.
Current reseach can also be accessed through peer to peer (mostly) networks like ArXiv. It is perhaps not as immediate to the avarage student, but journal prices are a sizable expence to a library (and consequently university) budget. Mergers of publisher pushes up the price, and excessive copyright enforcement only adds to this.
While waiting for these innovations to come to fruition, I refuse to sell my textbooks back. My apartment, as a result, is now insulated against the cold by a bookshelf against each wall.
One of my majors in college was English and so every semester I would buy 5-6 novels for each literature class I was taking. I usually tried to find out ahead of time which edition was being used so that I could find it at a used bookstore or online which was usually cheaper. However, one time I could not find the edition of a Hemingway novel and forced to buy it from the bookstore.
Well, when I looked inside I found out why I could not find the edition anywhere – it was older than I was! This class was taught in spring of 2000 and the book was printed in 1971. By the cover, it originally sold for $1.50. Apparently in nearly thirty years, its value had skyrocketed to the $10 I spent on it.
Fortunately, the professor threw a fit and had the bookstore refund all our money for the books and we selected another printing and bought it from a local bookstore instead.
As for textbooks in medical school, I don’t know of anyone who sells them back to the bookstore. There are a few people who try to sell to the classes behind us, but I think in general people keep their books. It stresses me out to think of how much money I’ve spent on books this year alone – every six weeks it is another rotation which means another main text, likely another set of handbooks for the white coat, and review books for exams.
Soft-line, as the clothing, etc. is called, is a very small part, dollar-wise, for most stores. As you said, very high profit, but low in the bottom line.
Textbooks are 75% or more of the college store’s dollars at the end of the day. Consider that they will sell thousands upon thousands of books compared to a few hundred (if they’re lucky) sweatshirts.
Mass-market books, like 99% of what B&N carries, run at a general minimum of 40% discount that goes up with quantity. When you consider how many books B&N orders through its central warehouse, they can sometimes get up to 55-60% off the cover price; then they can discount an extra amount to draw customers and raise quantity.
It’s not that it’s unprofitable, just slim margin. B&N has always been in the textbook business–Len Riggio bought B&N as a textbook store, then bought B. Dalton, and then started the superstore juggernaut. Obviously a handsome profit can be made, but it’s gotten to where only a conglomerate like B&N or Follett can do it.
You guys should try studying biological sciences 
You want a rip off, it’s there.
Every 2 years a new text book comes out with 80% new information. You can’t GIVE away old immunology text books. I read a book from 95 while I was taking an immunology class in 99, with a brand new book.
A two page section in the '95 book said many of these functions were unknown.
In the '99 one it was up to a 30 page chapter. 
The BEST way to sell text books with NO effort:
Wait until the end of the term BEFORE a class starts that uses the same text book – this works great over spring break. I usually got 80% of the used book price in cash. This works best for Math, Econ and Chemistry texts, which are updated fairly infrequently. Cause the thing is, when you sell a book with about 1 week before the next round of classes start up you’re actually selling the books to the bookstore to turn around and sell the students. You’re not selling the books to a 3rd party, who in turn ships/sells them out across country to a college with a high demand for it where the books are in turn marked up slightly so the bookstore can make a profit.
Anyway, to continue my Immunology text book story. I finished the class figured I’d keep the book, but next term I realized my book would be out of date by the time I’d hit grad school. So 2 terms after buying the book I tried to sell it.
235$…
I got nothing.
A new edition was comming out in 3 months.