70%? Do you give the store manager a blowjob or something? We were lucky to get 50%, and that was if the book was in demand and if it was in perfect condition.
Reselling at the bookstore is for suckers, dude. It’s all about Amazon or Half. I usually get about 70-80% of what I paid back.
Yeah, the bookstore at my college gave lots less than half when you sold it back to them. I never saw folks so pissed off as when they found out how little money they’d get back. Nobody expected a full refund, but they’d literally get like 10 percent or maybe less.
At Purdue, there was a designated area on campus where you could take your books to sell directly to other students - in theory, you could get more than 50% of the cover price and they could get them for less than the 80-90% one usually had to pay for a used text.
I never took advantage of this as my books were pretty specialized and, in theory, I could use them at work. In theory.
Anyway, I thought it was a good idea. I wonder if they still do it?
I am relatively new on the boards here, so most of you dont know me from adam, but I am a medieval recreationist, and I have put a crowbar in the wallet to get some reference books…one of them i lucked out on was originally a 125 pounds british book that Amazon dot UK listed for 15 pounds british…[Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlocked] and another by a FoaF called Soup for the Qan for $125US. garment research, and culinary research are very restricted fields of interest, and many of the books we use are extremely rare, or in many cases out of print for varying numbers of years [one of my reference books i had to get off an antique bookseller in Germany and i still wince when I use it as it was over $300us 10 years ago. FWIW, i haven’t seen a copy for sale in 5 years]
The cost of reserch materials is extreme, but as another poster pointed out, the publishers are trying to recoup the costs of selling a handful of copies. unfortunately many times the stupid publishers are so stuck on treewarez that they have to sell for an inordinate cost what they could burn to DVD/CD and sell for a 10th of the cost.
Most publishers need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat! I know an awful lot of students would love to be able to get their texts in CD form, or markable PDF files. I for one love my PDA, I can pop a text in that I am going to need to reference and schlep off to a meeting, and if something gets pointed out, or i need to reference it later to look something up in a different text, i can just modify the document and keep going=)
Very good points, aruvqan, digital distribution of these books could solve the cost problem. Of course, it brings in the piracy/copying problem, so it won’t happen for a while, I’ll bet.
I have found that no matter what stuff will get bootlegged, though the more expensive it is the less guilt people feel about doing it.
i would be willing to bet that there would be a whole lot more people willing to buy the various textbooks if they were priced down at $100 US than at $1200 US no matter how spiffy the book is=)
I just think publishing on demand and electronic publishing are the way of the future, and are entirely more cost effective for books that are not going to be selling more than a few thousand copies. Although one of the first ebooks I ever saw was the bible=)
I do know that i am taking my backlog of out of print and disintegrating paperbacks, and scanning them in just so i can toss the hard copies. i have around 10k books ranging from textbooks and reference books to a couple of gor novels a roomie abandoned in our dorm room in my freshman year 20mumble years ago…I simply can’t deal with yellowing disintegrating non-archival quality paperbacks, and since fair use allows me one copy, I scan and destroy after proofing=) i bought one copy, I own one copy=) I find that for enjoyment reading, I adore my PDA as I can load 10 books in and it slides into my pocket…great for waiting rooms, in resteraunts if I eat solo, in the car while waiting for mrAru…on the plane=) I love good technology when applied correctly=)
I’m curious how you do this, since it seems like a LOT of work.
Except why can I buy a book that had a limitied run of only a few hundred for $7? Granted it is a smaller book, but not by much, then most text books, and is paperback, but still it can’t be that much more expensive to make a normal textbook that will have more copies made.
I wish I had a way of buying textbooks on line when I was in college. Then again I never bought all the books when I was in college as is.
YMMV, most publishing companies charge out the wazoo because they print [for sake of argument] 1000 copies of Book X on the rare and unusual hobby of lefthanded underwater basket weaving. Their standards of publication [hardback, quarto sized, archive quality paper, non-deckled edges] is used for every book no matter what. They also publish 10,000 copies of book Y, which is a popular text on comparative fly-tying. The actual costs of publishing the books run $50 per book in 10,000 lots, any smaller lot is going to be $100. Right there you have one book costing double what a different book is going to cost. Transportation on the special order book on basketweaving is $10 per book because it has to be shipped out upon ordering, when the other book gets sold by the case, which cost $10 for the case of 10 books as it goes out at a bulk rate. Now you are up to $110 for book X, and $51 for book Y. Now, add in the booksellers bump, for sake of argument the routinely double the cost, so book X is now $220, and book Y is $102. BUT they dont regularly carry book X but they will special order it for you for a $10 fee…now we are up to $230 for book X. Amazon will carry book Y at $75.50 because they only bump the cost up by half. Off hand dont know Amazons special order policy…maybe the publisher wont let amazon special order it…so you are stucj getting one book for $230 and another almost identical book from the same company for $75.50…
Different publishing companies have different ways to price things, but I also have seen refernce books going for dirt cheap, and otehr going for my firstborn=\ Much depend also on actual binding techniques, ranging from hardbacks that are glued together like paperbacks, softbound books that are glue bound like paperbacks, and hardbacks properly saddle stitched and bound, and softcovers that are stitched and bound. FWIW, I would prefer to get spiral bound books as they lay nice and flat=) and are cheaper to produce…