BUYING BOOKS?
Look to the left, look to the right: students with eFollett and Virginia Book Company bags stuffed with books are everywhere. From the look of it, the hunt for textbooks has officially begun and will probably continue until at least the last day of the add/drop and late-registration period.
Look to the left, look to the right: students with eFollett and Virginia Book Company bags stuffed with books are everywhere. From the look of it, the hunt for textbooks has officially begun and will probably continue until at least the last day of the add/drop and late-registration period.
Textbook bill allows students to comparison shop
By Ryan Farr
Last year, the Virginia Legislature enacted the Textbook Market Fairness Act to confront rising textbook costs, requiring public colleges and universities to post on their Web sites textbook lists before each semester so students could comparison shop before classes began.
Since it went into effect July 1, VCU has complied and posted textbook lists, yet few students seem to know anything about them.
“I had no idea,” freshman mass-communications major Ashley Mullins said about the online textbook lists. But now that she knows about them, Mullins said they sound very helpful.
“It would give us time to save up the money, see how much we will approximately need, and then we could get them and be ready for classes before they start,” she said.
Spearheaded by the political action group Virginia21, the Textbook Market Fairness Act states among other requirements that public state colleges and universities must post all required textbooks for each offered course as soon as professors submit their selections. They must be in a central location and in a standard format and include each book’s ISBN number.
The legislation arose in response to campus bookstores practice of hoarding textbook information for their own competitive advantage.
Virginia Book Company owner Ernest Mooney acknowledged the advantage his store had before the law, even though he used to have to pay the VCU Bookstore 50 cents for each photocopied textbook list from professors.
“As a bookstore manager, obviously I would prefer that that information be held confidential until the very day before classes start because that protects my business and keeps my customers from going on the Internet,” Mooney said.
“But as a consumer, a parent of three college graduates,” he continued, “it is only fair, right and just that that information be made available. The fact that they can get that book on the Internet and save 20, 30, 40 dollars-more power to them.”
It remains dubious how much students can save if they do not know which books to buy. Some have blamed a lack of advertising for students’ unawareness of the online lists. Others blame the nature of the online posting itself, at VCU and beyond. The Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, reported Aug. 19 that U.Va.’s textbook lists were 122 pages long, hard to navigate and also encrypted, making it impossible to copy or print book titles.
U.Va. posts its lists on its lesser-used university bookstore page, not the UVA homepage. Similarly, VCU’s lists are only on the VCU Bookstore page. Despite the large logo at the top of both the Monroe Park and VCU Medical Center Bookstore Web sites reading “Find Your Textbooks Here!” many students still find the link’s location inconvenient.
“Nobody goes there,” senior marketing major Richard DeKeyser said about the VCU Bookstore Web site. “I think it should be on your Blackboard. By the time you register for your class you should automatically have the information posted on Blackboard.”
Other students proposed to move the lists elsewhere, to the VCU homepage or the “Current Students” page. Currently, neither the operating VCU Web site or the new site’s prototype have a link to them.
Rumors circulated in April that the VCU Bookstore had already received most of its fall semester textbook lists but failed to post them online. If true, the bookstore would have violated the year-old law prohibiting such behavior. While Monroe Park Campus Bookstore employees said they could not comment on the matter, their parent company eFollet remained unaware of any delays.
Mooney said the Virginia Book Company had to contact the VCU Bookstore in June, however, because they had not posted any lists.
“We had a struggle with them this year initially,” Mooney said. “We wrote a letter to the powers that be and told them they were in violation of the law and that they needed to get that information online right away.”
But the VCU Bookstore responded shortly after Mooney sent his letter, he said, and posted the lists.
“We got letters of apology,” he said. “We got letters assuring us that it wasn’t going to happen again.”
Just how long before classes start do students need their assigned textbooks? The answers vary. Some said they need a few days, while others said they need weeks or even months.
Jessica Breheim, a sophomore business-administration-and-management major, said they should be available once students begin registering for classes. She recalled her frustration after entering an accounting class and finding out she would need several books and a CPS clicker.
“I’d probably have taken a different class if I’d have know that,” she said.
Other students are content getting their books without any textbook notice. They said they wait to get their course syllabi and then buy their books.Senior urban-studies major Jodi Humpage cited convenience as her deciding factor as she exited the VCU Bookstore with her entire book load two days into the semester.
“I knew they would have them,” she said. “That’s worth the extra 10 bucks to me.”
While bookstores on campus might offer the most convenience to students during this time, other viable options do exist. In recent years, students and faculty alike have increasingly turned to the Internet as a virtual bookstore, as book prices have soared because of costly add-on materials, including complete color layouts, compact discs and other bundled extras, not to mention repeated revisions.
To find out more about the textbook industry in Virginia, read the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s “A Report on Textbook Purchasing Practices and Costs in the Commonwealth” at www.schev.edu.
The concerns for high prices are not without warrant. A 2005 Government Accountability Office report found textbook prices nearly tripled from 1986 to the end of 2004, increasing 186 percent. In Virginia, the State Council for Higher Education for Virginia concluded in “A Report on Textbook Purchasing Practices in the Commonwealth” students spent on average $300 for books in the spring 2005, and the amount of students spending $500 or more continues to grow. Forty-two percent of students responded that for at least one semester they could not afford to purchase books.
The same report, which the Virginia General Assembly requested, verified students’ main reason for turning to the online marketplace: they actually save money on both new and used books. Of the 12,650 students surveyed for the report, most students who bought their books at campus bookstores-27.5 percent-paid $500 or more; most students who bought their books online-27.3 percent-only paid $200 to $299.
The report said Amazon.com was the most popular Web site students use to buy books. Other popular Web sites included half.com, ebay.com, ecampus.com, mbsdirect.com, abebooks.com, bigwords.com, campusbooks.com, alibris.com and bookbyte.com.
Kevin Williams, a junior computer science major, has used Amazon.com to order textbooks for two years. He has not yet obtained all of his books for the semester, but he already has ordered $160 worth of them on the Web site, he said. He added he will likely order the rest of them on Amazon.com and plans to continue using the Web site in the future.
“I don’t expect the bookstores to stop being as expensive as they are,” he said.
Although he predicted he will spend $400 this semester on books, most of which are new editions, he said he should save $50 to $60 that he would otherwise have to spend at a bookstore.
“It’s still worth it,” he said.
AbuBaker Salih, a senior chemistry major, said he also uses Web sites like Amazon.com and ebay.com for textbook bargains. Citing a good experience he had last year when he bought a biochemistry book online, he said he looks at prices but also lengths of delivery times.
Salih approximated he will spend this semester about $100 to $200 on books, but only because he is not taking many classes. One semester he almost spent $500 on books, he said.
“Being a senior has its upsides,” he said.
While Web sites like Amazon.com function similarly to tangible bookstores, other Web sites offer completely different approaches to accessing textbooks.
Textbookrevolution.org, for example, is a student-led, volunteer-operated Web site that posts textbooks, lecture notes and other mostly undergraduate educational materials as PDF files and e-books. The copyright holders of the books, categorized by subjects like biology, economics and math, approve the usage of the books before Textbook Revolution posts them.
Similar Web sites include freeloadpress.com, safariu.com and lulu.com. All of these allow professors to create in some fashion their own personalized textbooks as well as offering students access to them.
Closer to campus, the Student Government Association offers a book-trading Web site, which students can access from the SGA’s Web site, vcusga.com. Students cannot purchase books directly from the Web site, but they can find the books they need and then arrange to meet the sellers, all of whom are VCU students. As of Saturday, the Web site advertised 993 books, all of which were for VCU courses.
When students register for the book-trading Web site, they automatically register for SGA’s other online forums, and vice versa.
Student Body President Ali Faruk said this feature connects students to their SGA representatives, thereby paving the way for quick communication. He said the feedback he has received from students concerning the book trading Web site has been very positive.
But Faruk warned students about some dishonest sellers who might not accurately describe the conditions of the books they sell.
“Take normal precautions and make sure what you buy is what it is,” he said.
Dishonesty has not been a major issue, Faruk added, but it remains a necessary consideration. Otherwise, the Web site has given students more money than they would have received if they sold their books to bookstores and also saved them significant amounts of money, sometimes in the range of hundreds of dollars.
“Five-hundred dollars can be the difference between whether a student stays in school,” Faruk said.
