Students cheated by textbook sales

At present, many campuses push students to resell their books for mere pennies to the dollar…. At present, many campuses push students to resell their books for mere pennies to the dollar. Being recompensed so little for such a large investment should be taken as an insult. If you decide that you definitely don’t need a book, donate it to your local library; at least that does some good for the community.

Part of the reason why stores like Pitt’s The Book Center get away with underpaying for used books is that we – the students – let them. It is the blindness and indifference of the students on this issue that give the stores market control.

To be an informed textbook consumer, I need access to information: book titles, authors, prices and ISBNs. The Book Center knows this info early on, yet they refuse to make it available until the week before class starts in an attempt to foil my plans of shopping around.

I demand that this information be made available as soon as the bookstore receives it from University faculty and staff. This behavior of withholding information from students for the assurance of financial gain is underhanded; I want to see it stopped immediately.

If a separate, private company ran The Book Center, I would understand this behavior. Ironically, rival bookstores like Got Used have more reasonable pricing rules.

To be ripped off and used by the same people who are supposed to have a vested interest in me is nothing less than shocking. Or is it naive to expect the University to be a benign entity?

Instead of separating the fool and his money, maybe they could concentrate more on educating that fool on how to buy textbooks intelligently.

I would love to start an online newsgroup that would allow students to exchange books for free. It would be an ideal system through which buyers pay less and sellers earn more. SGB’s SWAPitt program of two years ago attempted exactly this. It had the ambition and the leadership to succeed, but what it lacked was the financial resources to fully publicize it.

To those Pitt administrators with the power or ability to make a difference: consider the amount of harm you are doing to our students by denying them the benefit of officially sponsoring a book swap. It’s certainly within the administration’s ability to use the resources it is in control of to sufficiently advertise a book swap.

It’s not hard for someone to walk into the bookstore and unload $140 on a book he’s never going to use – if his parents are paying for it.

But there are students who, for various reasons, get along without any financial help from parents. It is tremendously difficult to concentrate on studying and learning when one has to worry about paying the gas bill – or being able to afford all of one’s books for the semester, for that matter. It is these students who can benefit most from a book swap program.

Since whining about the problem isn’t going to solve anything, I offer my advice to those who will purchase new books next semester.

Use old editions if you can obtain them. Unless the instructor uses specific problems from the text as homework, or if the material is in a rapidly changing field, there is no reason to have the latest edition. If you have never compared two editions of the same text, you may be in for a surprise: the material remains virtually unchanged.

I simply cannot believe how many people are suckered into buying inferior textbooks. Many instructors adopt departmental textbook choices that are – in certain cases – very poor conveyors of information. If you can find a better textbook than one currently employed, use it. That is what I did for calculus a few semesters ago. I skipped buying the rubbish text that the department employs in favor of the infinitely superior Stewart text.

When possible, purchase books online. Books that are relatively inexpensive can be found online for as low as half the bookstore price. More expensive books, while only slightly cheaper than at the bookstore, are tax-free purchases at stores like Amazon.com. Many online deals also offer free shipping.

I cannot blame bookstores, including The Book Center, for the steadily increasing price of textbooks. That would be equivalent to blaming gas station owners for the rise in gas prices.

However, bookstores do have responsibility over their used book system. If The Book Center can exercise some control on their profit margin, I’m certain it would translate into a better book-buying experience for students.

E-mail Karim at kab85@pitt.edu.