From required reading to neede cash
they head home. Instead, they will be turning those heavy books into something much lighter — money.
Money is a big concern to many college students, since many don’t have any, so when school starts and the cash registers are humming with delight, it is nice to know what the options are.
The most common of these options would be the USU Bookstore. Susan Miller, curriculum manager at the USU Bookstore, said there are many advantages to buying textbooks there.
“The biggest advantage to buying here is you know you’ll get the right book, it will be easy to return and your money is staying at USU,” Miller said.
She said that students are often surprised when they see how the textbook dollar is split up. For every dollar spent on a textbook at the USU Bookstore, Miller said only 4.9 cents of that is profit to the Bookstore.
“Most of that goes back to the school,” Miller said, noting that the USU Bookstore, which operates independently of the university, often makes a number of donations and they are probably the biggest source of funding for the Taggart Student Center.
Amazon, eBay, and other online stores are another way to purchase and sell textbooks. This gives students a variety of options when it comes to how much they want to spend, as well as selling them. But this doesn’t come without risks.
“I buy my textbooks online, because I can usually find them on eBay for half the price,” said Clay Olsen, a junior majoring in graphic design. “It usually takes a little longer for them to get here, but I figure I can suffer a little to save a little.”
Rachel Washburn said she has heard of friends who have bought books online and ended up with wrong editions or books that weren’t quite legitimate.
“There’s just a high chance that you’re going to get the wrong book,” Washburn said. “I ordered a book online, then two weeks later they told me they were out and I was behind.”
Washburn said she likes to buy her books at Aggie Books, where she has found that “every book was at least $5 cheaper.”
Mason Andersen, a freshman majoring in English education, said that while Aggie books did not carry all the books he needed for his English class, he liked selling his books back to them.
“When I sold my books last time, I had gone to the Bookstore to see what price they got there, then went back to [Aggie Books] and they said, ‘Well let’s beat it by a buck,’ and they took all of them,” Andersen said.
Alternative stores such as Aggie Books and Beat the Bookstore advertise buying back for more and selling for less.
While Miller said the USU Bookstore will have all the textbooks students need for every class, places like Beat the Bookstore will carry only the high-demand books.
Eric Corrington runs the Logan Beat the Bookstore, and said that his inventory is based off of what students bring in for buyback, but having every book a student needs isn’t something he can guarantee.
“I wouldn’t be able to guarantee that because I’m focusing my inventory from what a student brings in to sell to me,” Corrington said.
Corrington said he can give students more options with buyback.
“There’s a whole lot more behind the scenes that students don’t see that allows me to take in a greater variety of books,” Corrington said.
“I am aware that the Bookstore is working hard to deliver what they think is a fair value because the ultimate disadvantage is, in the students’ eyes, whether or not I gave them that value that they were looking for,” he said. “But that is an individual transaction. I can’t predict something global.”
What Corrington said he would do with books sold to him that the Bookstore would not originally accept is turn around and sell them to a student somewhere else. This is something a student could do on their own, but Corrington said that by selling to him it eliminates the hassle of selling books online.
“I can potentially deliver a better value than online,” Corrington said. “You get what you want, you don’t have the book and you have something that you can take away.”
The USU Bookstore is aware of its competition and Miller said they are working hard to help students out by finding ways to offer more money during buyback. This semester, they are offering 10 percent more back on a student’s entire buyback load if they put that money onto a gift card to the Bookstore.
Miller said they looking toward options that will allow them to implement a textbook rental system, where professors would commit to keeping a book for a set amount of years, allowing the bookstore to rent out textbooks for a fraction of what it would cost the student to buy it.
-ashleykarras@cc.usu.edu