Bookstore isn’t to blame for high prices
Three hardbacks, five paperbacks, three coursepacks, two supplemental (but still required) readings and an online subscription to a British newspaper that I’ve never heard of before in my life. Grand total: $467.98.
Buying books sucks, and I have the privilege of saying that I for one had it light (sorry pre-meds.remember the delayed gratification). But as someone who for the past six weeks worked in the back room of the basement of a campus bookstore that happens to already be inside a building that blocks out the sun, let me tell you: we’ve got it pretty good.
For the past two weeks, Jersey boys and sorority girls alike have been seen walking around campus with those characteristic white eFollett bags, carrying the bounty of their hunts and muttering the entire time about how the campus store just committed an act on them that’s listed as a Class A felony in Missouri. This time of year, the bookstore is hated to such a degree that Facebook groups about its ineptitude see a dramatic bump in membership. You’re poor, you’re getting ripped off and you have a right to be angry – but first look at who you should be getting pissed off at.
Most of this deliciousness starts during the finals of first semester, when immediately after the Gen. Chem final, several hundred kids who suddenly realize they don’t want to be doctors anymore rush to Mallinckrodt to see how much they can get for their bright green book. They don’t hear a number they like, their spirits are further dropped, and the B-school’s enrollment increases. In reality, though, buyback is a game that you have no control over. The maximum you’ll ever get for a book is half – and that’s only if your professor wasn’t lazy and ordered your book before the winter solstice. If nobody’s using the book, though, you get the publisher’s wholesale price.which is about enough to buy you a strudel. The big kick comes if the publisher released a new edition, in which case you get nothing. Publishers, you see, don’t make any money when the bookstore sells you used books, so they release new editions to screw you over.
If the author doesn’t feel like writing anything, though, they have another strategy. If you took Intro. to Psych. last semester, you didn’t get any money for your book. Not because there was a new edition, but because the publisher attached a study guide and a survey to the same book, shrink-wrapped it, and sold it as something else. The big national publishing houses pull up book prices faster than the University pulls up tuition; they are the reason that your paperback physics book costs over a $100, and the reason that you still have all nine of those tiny, unsellable books from your German Lit. class.
The campus bookstore, then, shouldn’t be the ones you blame. For their part, they try to help and reliably have everything you need, including the ISBNs that you use to grab books off of half.com. But after shipping, for most books that don’t have the word “thermodynamics” in the title, it’s as cheap (and a hell of a lot easier) to lug those books up from the basement and not worry that you’re getting an edition from the Federated States of Micronesia.
Obviously, the bookstore isn’t the only place on campus to get your books. Lock & Chain sponsors a charitable (albeit hit or miss) book sale at the beginning of every semester, and WashUBooks runs an operation that can get you books for cheap – if you don’t feel weird going through a process that vaguely resembles a drug pickup. Neither of these places, though, can give your architect friend enough cardboard and balsa wood to last him through his next critique.
So as you pick up and return the last of your books before the drop date, remember that everyone in that cavern of cubbies and shelves isn’t there to screw you over, and be nice to Marc and Nicole – they’re good people.
Nick is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences.
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