Quick question. Any idea how much the school bookstore makes on its book sales, and how much goes to the publishers?
Can you guess where I just came from? Yup, a freaking used book cost me 96 damn dollars!!
My husband worked in a college bookstore. Unfortunately, he’s asleep. However, he and I talked to his boss not too long ago, when we last needed moving boxes, and this topic came up.
The bookstore makes much more profit on a used book than a new book. That’s because the publishers are not involved at all. The bookstore buys the books from students. The formula for both the bookstore my husband worked for (slightly off-campus) and the “official” college bookstore was that they would buy the books for 50% of the new price and sell them to other students for 75% of the new price. You can see that the profit margin is not bad there, especially if they sell the same book many times. 
This means (if your bookstore follows the same formula) that your book would have cost $128 if you had had to buy it new. If that class intends on using the same book (and same edition) next semester, you should be able to sell your book back to the bookstore for about $64.
I don’t remember the profit involved in new books.
Wouldn’t that be the initial profit, sort of like gross pay? Now what’s the actual profit (the net pay, if you will) after you factor in employee salaries, insurance costs, etc.?
I talked to the people who run my school’s bookstore for a presentation last semester. It is a public university, and it is the school’s bookstore (not an indpendent one). They told me that their goal is to basically break even, but be sure not to lose money. Supposedly all their profits go towards maintaining the store, paying employees, etc. It seems kind of hard for me to believe, but the person we interviewed had no reason to lie to us, and they said all of their financial records are open to the public (although we didn’t check into them).
They used the same pricing system that Tamex mentioned in her post. They bought used books at 50% of the new price, and sold them at 75% of the new price. They didn’t say how much they bought new books for, but they did say that the prices were set by the publishers, and not the store itself.
I have no affiliation with them other than as a satisfied customer, so I think it’s OK to mention:
For used books, I’ve had great luck with http://www.abebooks.com - it’s a web inventory database for umpteen thousand bookstores worldwide. Great prices for used books, and an essential tool for finding rare books.
Yes, of course. Sorry. I don’t know what the actual profit would be–the conversation didn’t go that far. His employees are mostly students working part-time (no benefits other than 10% discount) and making around minimum wage. I’d guess that much more money gets eaten up in shipping costs and building rent.
There’s also money to be made selling textbooks that your school isn’t using to other schools’ bookstores, as well as pens, pencils, sweatshirts, etc. Actually, he’s gotten rid of a lot of the extra stuff over the years in order to expand the textbook area.
I don’t think the guy is fabulously wealthy, but he seems to be doing all right.
I worked at my college bookstore some years back. I can’t speak for other colleges, but at this one the profit margins had to be huge. They did not buy used books at 50% and sell them at 75% of new price. They bought them from students at a price that was purely demand-driven. If a particular book was in short supply, you might be able to sell it to them for 50% of the new price, but if they had a large number of copies in stock already or the lists of required texts from the staff showed that the book would not be in great demand, the price you could get for it would drop, sometimes to ridiculously low levels. This is not conjecture. This was the explanation that employees gave if a student complained about the amount he or she was offered for a textbook. I ended up keeping some texts (I still have them) because they offered me only a couple of dollars when I tried to sell them back.
I should also point out that his bookstore, though located on campus, was privately owned. The university had no direct involvement in the buying or selling of the texts.
I also heard dark rumors from another employee (though I never witnessed this personally) that the owner of the store would go through the newly-bought-back used books looking for those that showed no signs of wear. When he found one he would remove it from the used book pile and resell it as new, at full price.
I have a tough time believing that last bit. It seems to me that if he marked a used book as new that had even so much as a single bit of highlighter marker or one pencil-scribble in it, he’d get called on it and be in deep deep water with both the university and the publisher. Then again, this guy was greedy and didn’t strike me as being particularly bright, so maybe it is true.
I worked for nearly a year as a (used) book buyer for a public university. But that was nearly a decade ago so some of this might be a little dated.
Our bookstore was required by university charter to break even. So in my case we set books at the lowest price possible, while still covering costs. IIRC we were generally 10% less than the national average on new books and 20% less than the average on used. So your book would have probably cost at least $86 had you bought it from us.
So why are textbooks so expensive?
1- Lack of volume. The more you print, the cheaper each book is. Many textbooks have print runs in the thousands compared to fiction which generally has runs in the hundreds of thousnads or millions. So the fixed costs associated with printing, such as typesetting, has to be recouped with a higher cost per book.
2- Unusual sizes and materials. Textbooks frequently are printed in unusual sizes and on more expensive stock (such as ultra glossy paper). They are also frequently manufactured to much higher standards (better bindings, covers etc), so that they can take the abuse an average student dishes out to their books.
3- Contributor fees. Textbook authors frequently recieve a higher comission than other authors. And some textbooks can have a dozen contributing authors. Then you add pay for artists and photographers. Who are generally paid by the piece rather than through commission. So due to small print runs, the cost per book goes higher.
4- Publisher gouging. Text book publishers are very aware of who their customers are, and it is not the students. Publishers advertise and promote very heavily to professors. A professor can expect to get hundreds to thousands of dollors worth of free material (usually teaching aids) for selecting a particular book. Of course the publishers need to recoup those expenses. But once a particular book has won the heart and mind of a professor or dept. head, the publisher has a monopoly and can pretty much charge whater they want. And at this point some publishers (but not all) most definately do gouge.
5- Screwups etc. Textbooks are a perishable item, so to speak. They need to be on the shelves by a particular day. Should anything go wrong, it costs extra to get it fixed. We would ask that the departments provide their lists of required books 6 months in advance. This allowed us to reserve stock fom publishers, purchase used books from students rather than resellers, and ship using bulk freight rates.
Nearly 20% of the professors woudn’t get us their orders until the week before school started. This meant we had to pay premiums from the publishers (for ordering late), we had to buy from resalers who charge a great deal more than we would need to pay students (and still need to pay shipping), we would have to have them shipped by air, etc. All of which greatly raised the cost of the book. And the professors would then inevitibly blaim us for not having it.
Your standard Jackie Collins bestseller will be printed in a stardard size on poor quality stock, slapped into the cheapest binding and cover possible. It will have little or no art which may already be stock art already owned by the publisher. They slap on a cover done by the in-house artist and they can get the cost per book down to 20% of what they generally charge for it. Due to the reasons listed above, textbooks will never come close to matching this.
Bartman left off a key aspect of textbook prices:
- Returns. Publishers have a pretty good return policy for college bookstores with unsold books. Since this costs money, the publisher has to charge the bookstore more originally. Note that some books, which may also be used as texts, can be bought for somewhat less from a regular bookstore that may not be able to return it so easily.
douglips nailed it. Try to find the books online if possible–via Amazon, B&N, www.half.com, or through some other outlet.
Here’s another wrinkle: I ordered copies of a textbook for my 3 classes back in the spring, then was told that they were making the new edition and we would all have to wait for it. Well, we went for the first two weeks of the semester without it. I finally got my professional copy the other day, and I’m the prof.
They’ve changed maybe ten percent of the content and made a new color scheme. Just because of that, they got to go to a new edition. Sheesh.
:rolleyes:
This may be quite obsolete, but if your college bookstore uses the ancient tagging system, the price tag will have a row of letters on the tag. The word pathfinder (or profitable, or some other 10-letter word) will tell you the wholesale cost of the book. It’s unlikely anyone still uses this, but tradition sometimes wins out over technology.
Our bookstore was non-profit; we were supposed to break even if possible.
Yes, the prices are obscene. As I recall, our markup was only 15% on books, 30% on supplies. (Worked there ten years ago)
We bought and sold used books if possible, but most times it wasn’t. We are a technical college, so most of our textbooks go to new editions quite rapidly, and rightly so. And many of our books include software. You sure as hell aren’t going to buy that back.
So the students couldn’t collect by selling them back, or save by buying them used.
I had to handle customer service, aigh! Try to explain to some kid that the $120 book they never opened is not returnable because it’d be pure charity on our part to take it. Do this a dozen times a day. Aigh, aigh!
As for publisher profits…I don’t know but I suppose there’s a lot of people involved taking a cut. Especially when they come out with new goddam book every year. New editions cost a lot more that reprints.