My brother, mother and (deceased) aunt are all lawyers and all of them were grateful they kept all of their books because they are useful for bar prep and reference.
Robin
How long does the bookstore take returns? IIRC, the schools I went to would do refunds until the end of the add/drop period. If they’ll take returns for a couple weeks (and of course if you have sufficient cash), you could get the text from them to use until you can get a cheapie copy from half.com or another place.
I’ve heard of it being done in Ireland, and I’ve gotten buybacks in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda. I’d be curious to know if it is a common phenomenon around the globe or not.
Can you tell that I spent more time with booze than with textbooks while I was in college? Thank goodness I found this place, because it turns out I missed out on learning some pretty interesting things. Between the SDMB and the Internet at large I’d say I’ve learned more in the last 3 years than I did in all of high school and a year of college . . .
DaLovin’ Dj
When I was in college, one of the student organizations set up a book fair where you could buy and sell directly from other students. It worked out great, unless you were unlucky enough to take a class the last time a particular book was to be used.
I pretty much resigned myself to the overpriced texts, but I never got over the poor quality of one in particular. Halfway thru the semester, it was, quite literally, falling apart. It was the most expensive text I ever had to buy, it was a wreck before the class finished, and the professor decided to go with a different text the next time.
I’m so glad it’s long behind me.
There’s actually a college course called “Critical Thinking”?
That wasn’t meant to be a slam on you GMRyujin, by the way.
I generally returned my college textbooks, but I retained all of my grad school texts. They are on a shelf in my office. I refer to them from time to time…
My bookstore’s policy is that they won’t accept opened textbooks for return. So, if I unwrap the book from its plastic, it’s useless and I may as well keep it.
Robin
My worst experience with book buyback was a for a psych class I had my last semester of college. They refused to buy the book back without the CD. The problem with this was, that they had not sold any of the books with the damn CD in the first place! That really pissed me off.
I, too, worked at a college bookstore. Just this past summer.
Was starting up my PhD program in the fall, and needed a quick job…and had always wanted to work in a bookstore, actually.
Had the interesting experience of a student who was signed up for the class I was teaching in the fall asking me if I knew if I thought he’d actually need to buy the books for the class (not knowing I was his instructor). That was fun. Heh, heh…
I actually liked doing Buyback. I’d say only about 15% of the customer were assholes about the money they got back. You just couldn’t take it personally. It was pretty much just a matter of explaining to them “See, if the book isn’t being requested for the upcoming semester, you aren’t going to get much for it, you understand?” Of course, this meant many folks hung onto books and are probably trying to return them again right now, when I no longer work there. Ah, well.
As to when books could be returned…we allowed people to do that anytime during the year. REFUNDS, however, were different. You got full money back on refunds, assuming the books were in the same condition you bought them in. You could typically only get a refund up to two weeks after the first week of classes.
Hell, I have textbooks that I paid a hundred bucks for twenty years ago, back when a hundred bucks was real money. Using the inflation calculator, I find that a hundred dollar book in 1982 would cost nearly two hundred today.
Of course, there are countless students whose parent’s actually buy the books, while the student just pockets the money when he sells it back.
And then there’s the guy I just dealt with. I said that we weren’t taking a particular book and he said “you can just keep it”. This store is about 450 sq ft., and that’s a generous estimate. We don’t have room for the books we DID take back.
Don’t get huffy with me, sir.
Gadfly, where do I find sharpened tuna? I would love to impale some of these people.
I tell people that regular used bookstores often take books back (especially anthropology books, I’ve found) but that just seems to be too much trouble, driving across the street and all.
Most of our books aren’t bought for retail sale in this store. We sell them back to wholesalers who then sell them to other stores (we once got a book with a 10 year old savings bond from a kid in North Carolina… we got it back to his mom. She was pissed at him.)
I like my job, and yes, it is only 10-15% of people who complain.
Long ago when I went to College my experience was similar to a lot of you. I would buy books for $80 and sell them for $20 at the end of the semester. Later, after I’d graduated, some enterprising people had set up a mobilhome across the street from the college bookstore and were selling stuff at 1/2 to 3/4 the price of the bookstore (same texts just cheaper). College had them shut down.
College.bookstores.are.just.evil.
Novels are easy. If you’re short on cash, check them out of the library as you go along. That’s what I did this spring for a class that required 5 (much better than that hellish 20). However, either get the books from the nearest town or city library or be prepared to beat everyone in your class who has the same idea to your school library.
If you don’t mind another bookstore clerk answering, if someone asked about the price discrepancy, I’d have to say “Do you think we work for free?”
Preparing for a semester is a lot of work. Someone has to clear away the books from the past semester, someone has to get every single bit of information from the professors, someone has to build the database of courses and titles, someone has to see to the books are bought back or ordered, someone has to check them in, someone has to make sure they’re where they’re supposed to be. In addition, someone has to make sure the store stays clean and someone has to keep an eye out for shoplifters.
I haven’t met any of these people who are working for free.
Yea. 2 credits. 50 minutes a week. Required.
Now I can be one of the morons shrieking “STRAWMAN!” and feeling very impressed with myself.
Buyback is the lubricant for the brutal anal rape that is buying textbooks from a college bookstore. Without it, the magnitude by which you’ve been screwed increases by 33%. At my community college, the buyback was actually conducted by a representative of the major textbook wholesaler. One quarter, the guy actually CACKLED while offering me $12 ($2 each, for pulping) for books that cost me $300. Compounding this was the fact that the bookstore would not disclose pricelists or information on what books were going to be resold or reused, which they were required to do, being a state agency. They had to be sued before they would reveal the information.
Vaseline™ and Your College Bookstore: Partners in education.
The worst example of bookstore price gouging was for one of my lit classes. The version of a Hemingway book we were required to buy cost fifty cents when it was first sold in 1973 and was costing $10 when sold in 1999. Yep, the old nasty thing had actually increased in value. Thankfully we convinced the prof to choose another version that we could find in a local bookstore so that we could spend about the same amout of money for a nonmoldly copy (it was important to use the same version so that when passages were referred to in class you wouldn’t have to struggle to find out what page it would be in your copy).
Of course it wasn’t the fault of the people working in the bookstore and hopefully we didn’t growl too much at them.
One of my profs apparently caught some flak (or so he told us) for telling us to find a nice cheap paperback version of one of the class readings instead of paying the outrageous prices at the bookstore for the same book.