By Katie Potzick
Deleshia Youngblood had her share of troubles with the textbook buying process. She had to buy an expensive, brand new psychology book for her personality class.
A month later, it went out of print and was replaced by a new edition, leaving Youngblood, a sophomore psychology major, like many of her peers, stuck with a suddenly irrelevant and financially worthless textbook.
“The whole experience was frustrating because it felt like I wasted money,” said Youngblood. “$200 just gone. Most of the information was in the textbook or online, so I could have done just as well in the class without the book.”
According to the 2004 GAO Report on College Textbooks, college students spend more than $5 billion a year on textbooks. This sum is the result of publishers raising the prices of the books and producing new editions so students cannot buy secondhand.
The question is how students can re-sell their books without losing too much money in the exchange. Many bookstores only buy back books at a fraction of the original price; depending on the edition, sometimes they won’t buy them back at all.
Then, there is the increasingly popular Internet route which offers the opportunity of selling books to other students across America at such sites as Amazon or Ebay. Students can also use the Marketplace application on Facebook to contact other U of L students looking for books.
However, the amount of students using Internet book sites has increased significantly, which has inflated prices.
“I use uoflbookexchange.com,” said junior philosophy major Sandra Tune. “It’s saved me a lot of money on tons of my books.”
The U of L BookExchange represents the lengths to which students will go to combat rising textbook prices, as it is the brainchild of Kentucky students fed up with the textbook industry.
Nathan Fort, who created U of L’s BookExchange, said it eliminates the middle man, also known as the book store.
“College bookstores have excessive overhead, thanks to their costs of operation with facilities and employees,” said Fort. “By moving the market online, that overhead is eliminated and the savings get funneled down to the students.”
The internet marketplace offers other opportunities for students to find more agreeable terms for their textbook transactions. With new web sites like U of L BookExchange, buyers and sellers can strike mutually beneficial deals and help reduce the cost of college.
Some students, such as Candice Burden, elect to keep their books.
“I know I will never use them again, but I figure if I paid for it, I might as well keep it and who knows, I may have a friend taking the class after me,” said Burden, a junior English major.
Sarah Watkins, a U of L Pan-African and women and gender studies graduate student and history instructor at Indiana University Southeast, gave the professor’s point of view on the issue.
“Sometimes the best book for the class is not the cheapest,” said Watkins. “I try to keep my students’ costs down, but I don’t want to compromise the quality of their education or what they’re getting out of the class.”
Just as in their studies, students willing to do their homework will be rewarded on the textbook market.
