Is your campus bookstore ripping you off? I don’t know about you but I’m tired off feeling ripped off by the school bookstore. I’ve decided to do some research to find out why I feel they’re ripping me off.
As I searched around the internet, I found that it’s most likely not the school bookstore ripping us students off. The blame needs to be placed at least partially on the publishers of the books. Most publishers sell the books to the bookstore at a reported cost of 75% of retail. The publishers give the bookstore a suggested retail price and most bookstores seem to stick with it. This means that the bookstore is only making a 25% profit off of he books we buy. So is the bookstore ripping us off or are the publishers?
Besides buying our books exclusively off of the internet at 25% retail cost, what other ideas might we as students propose be done to ease our book buying pains?
1 comment:
You know what makes books expensive: pictures, charts, mathematics, and frequent updates.
You know what students want: pictures to break up the text, charts to summarize the data, all the steps in the math spelled out, and a book with examples that are fresh in their memory.
I know that sounds callous, but go down to the bookstore and look for cheap required texts. Often they are novels - a couple hundred pages of nothing but text.
Diane raises a good point about frequent revisions too. Textbooks in slowly changing fields are a lot cheaper on average.
I'm sympathetic to Bart and Bob's comments. I've hated college bookstores a lot longer than you all have. But think about this like a manager. If college bookstores are making so much money, why aren't there private bookstores specializing in textbooks next to every campus? It turns out there are, but usually only around very large campuses, and even then there aren't many. So it simply can't be true that they are making a lot of money. They are certainly bringing in a lot of revenue, but there must be significant costs that we are overlooking.
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