re: #26 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

The tl;dr is at the bottom.

I worked selling college textbooks on and off in the 1980s. It was the way I was able to finish out my BA after I dropped out of college in 1982. Anyway, we were not the semi-official college bookstore, we were that other store, right next to the semi-official one, and it was always tough.

Someone’s making money off college textbooks, but it’s not the college bookstore. The standard discount on a new textbook was 20 percent. So I’m looking at Halliday and the bookstore would be paying $257.40 plus shipping (and those books are HEAVY, this edition weighs in at slightly over seven pounds). Even if you’re ordering 300 copies, you are not making bank on this book.

No, the real money was in used college textbooks. It was a constant battle, even in the 1980s, to keep up with the edition changes. Back then, what the book publishers would do is make deals with professors or departments for the “University Version” of the book used in (for example) Sociology 101. They’d be shrink-wrapped together with a workbook sized collection of articles that used to be printed down at Kinko’s (remember them?) but those moved to the textbook publisher, who had the economy of scale to clear the rights for the articles. (That was also a war in the 1980s, between print shops printing packets of articles for profs, and publishers sending threatening letters to print shops.)

You could hit the jackpot, then, if you could buy, say, that (in those days) brand new, first semester used biology textbook that had sold for $75 on its first outing. I, buying back books, would pay $37.50 for the book in December, and turn around and sell it for $60 in January. That was where the money was at—used textbooks. And if the textbook was used for a third or fourth or fifth semester, the profit margin became better. BUT you had to be super-careful about buying, making sure you had the right edition, or that the profs hadn’t changed books entirely, or that they weren’t going with those evil shrink-wrapped editions that would be “updated” semester to semester.

It was a constant struggle, and it was all tracked manually. We’d be buying books right and left and someone would should, “stop buying X Biology, we have enough” and at that point we’d stop paying $37.50 and then switch to paying the wholesale price, which was probably going to be around $20. Or, worse yet for the students, we were paying $15 for an old edition because we were in December, we knew Professor Y was using it for his the spring semester and that was what we were offering.

And, I’m going to wrap this up by saying that you have not lived until you’ve had one of those huge freshman biology textbooks chucked at you by an irate student that you just told was an old edition and we weren’t offering anything for it because we had a basement full already. (Which may or may not have been true.)

Oh, and just for the record, we only paid $1.00 for a copy of “The Puritan Dilemma” by Edmund Morgan. Because, again, that was for History 315 (usually fall) and we had 200 in the basement that we were holding over for 9 months until the next time massive sections of the course were being taught.

tl;dr: someone is making money, but it’s not the college bookstore, nor the long-suffering employee who just told you your book is worth nothing because Professor Z is using an edition with a one-time-only code and people have to buy the book new. Please do not throw books.