Rising textbook prices send students looking elsewhere for textbooks.
Year after year, during finals week, students load their backpacks down with textbooks too heavy to carry comfortably. They brave long lines filled with their peers, worn-out from the exams they finally finished, grumpy from the load of books strapped to their backs.
All this is done in hopes to recover a significant portion of the hundreds of dollars they spent on textbooks that semester. For Pacifico L. Bay III, the lack of money made from the Bookie buy-back sent him over the edge.
“The biggest frustration for textbooks by far is buying them for over a hundred dollars, then bringing them back to the bookstore and they only offer to buy them back for about twenty dollars,” Bay said in an email.
The Bookie has to keep up with the rising demand for used books, as well as make room for the new editions the publishers produce and the professors require. This causes used books that won’t be used the next year to be bought back for pennies on the dollar, since the Bookie won’t be able to turn around and sell them.
But the cost of textbooks is steep all around the Northwest. A 2007 survey of students at Oregon State University found that over half the students spent about $750 a year on textbooks -with about 75 percent of the students buying only used books.
Textbook prices increased of 3.2 percent from October 2009 to October 2010, according the Consumer Price Index. This increase, along with the constant flow of new editions from publishers, keeps the cost of textbooks up from year to year.
“The profits for publishers are in the first year of a new edition”, Bob Carbaugh, professor in economics at Central Washington University and co-author of the article “Are College Textbooks Fairly Priced?”, said in an e-mail.
With rising tuition, fees and textbooks, students have started to look for cheaper ways to gain access to textbooks. The same 2007 poll of OSU students showed that half the students surveyed used online bookstores to purchase their books. Third-party companies like Amazon and eBay have entire websites dedicated to college students and textbooks.
Professors are also helping students find lower textbook prices by researching Amazon and eBay, then reporting back to the students. Others are finding ways to provide the material for free to students, by placing it on reserve at the library or finding free online copies.
David Demers, a communication professor, was able to provide a PDF version of the book Athena’s Forum to his students for free. His wife owns the publishing company that owns the copyright to the book.
Demers said he would love to provide the books he writes to students at no cost, but he doesn’t own the copyrights. He also pointed out that the authors should be rewarded for their works.
“If you remove the financial incentive, it will reduce the quality of the books,” Demers said.
Social networking sites can also help students find less expensive books.
The Facebook group “Students buying/selling textbooks at WAZZU” is a group that students can join to post textbooks they need or textbooks they want to sell. Established by Pacifico Bay after his buyback frustrations grew, the group allows student to bypass third parties and work directly with each other.
The Facebook page has over 1,400 members who have already started posting books they want to sell at the end of this semester. Students can set their own prices, make offers of the books they need, and set up a convenient way to handle the transaction.
“One of the main concepts of creating this page was for students to help other students,” Bay said. “Many students have found people to buy books from and to sell books to.”
With the end of the semester approaching, students have already started posting the books they want to sell. By finals week the Bookie and Facebook page alike will be full of students trying to get the best price on an expensive commodity.
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