More textbook options available in Bookstore
Students hoping to save money and time buying textbooks this semester now have two more options, said USU Bookstore director David Parkinson.
Those options are the bookstore’s new online rental and price comparison services, which provide students with access to lower priced textbooks.
In December 2010, along with the bookstore’s switch to author alphabetization to make checkout faster, the option to rent textbooks was introduced to students.
Over the summer the price comparison service was also created and perfected to provide the students with what they need all in one place. This semester the bookstore plans on heavily marketing these options and, Parkinson said, the biggest reason for providing them is because the bookstore must “compete or die.”
“The idea of electronic textbooks has been out there for a decade. What does a student want in the end? A student wants the best price that they can get,” Parkinson said. “We’ve given students all the tools they need to find the right price.”
From the bookstore’s homepage shoppers have access to a list of departments and classes by clicking on the “Compare” link in the top, left-hand corner. From there students can highlight the classes they will be taking and continue on to check and compare the average price of their course materials with prices pulled from search engines on the Internet. Books can be added to an online shopping cart and the student can go through each provider’s checkout process right on the bookstore’s page.
Also on the homepage is a link that leads to the rental process. Students can rent books for a certain number of days from Follett Publishing, and at the end of the semester, ship them back. Parkinson said this saves about as much as buying a textbook from the bookstore and selling it at buyback at the end of the year.
“If you buy a textbook and you come see us at buyback, you pay about half the price of the book. If you rent the book, you’re going to pay about half the price of the book. So it’s about the same, but the student has to wait three months to get their money back,” Parkinson said.
Student reactions to the bookstore’s new options are mixed.
Melissa Johnson, a senior, said that her experience with the bookstore has been mostly good but at times frustrating. Despite that, Johnson said she tried the bookstore’s price comparison option and was happy with it.
“I actually used it for one of my books. It was a lot cheaper,” she said.
Johnson said she generally doesn’t choose to buy books online because of the length of time it takes for them to ship – a feeling that is echoed by many students.
“It’s got to be cheap, and we’ve got to make sure that we can buy them here,” freshman Caleb Mairs said. Of the online services, he added, “I would definitely look into it if I had more information about it.”
Other students were very open to the idea of trying out the bookstore’s services. “It would save a trip down here,” said freshman David Bowers.
Bowers and Mairs agreed, the best outcome of buying their textbooks, in whatever form, would be to get the right textbooks at the right price.
To provide the right price, Parkinson said the bookstore is taking several large risks. “It actually decreases our revenues, of course, because we’re selling an item that’s at a lower value, and because we’re working with other companies, there’s less profit margin to be had. So it may negatively affect our financials, but it’s what the customer wants, so we have to adjust.
“By renting,” he added, “we actually increase that risk because we’re also still selling the book. Being able to identify the quantity of how many we should have on our shelf gets tough.”
Parkinson said that despite the risk, providing the customers with what they want is the bookstore’s overall goal, and he hopes that perspectives will change because of it.
“What we’re hoping that you learned along the way,” Parkinson said, “was, ‘Wow! The bookstore is competitive on most of those titles. Maybe that’s not such a bad bookstore anymore, is it?’ That’s our end goal. Compete or die.”
He added, “The bookstore has a reputation for high prices. We’ve said for a long time that we’re trying. This website proves that we are. We want to kill the idea that the bookstore is overpriced. Instead we want, ‘The bookstore is my friend.'”
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