Textbooks Take Bite From Student Budget

Jennifer Libertowski, spokeswoman for the National Association of College Stores, a trade group of campus bookstores based in Oberlin, Ohio, said that a recent study found that students were buying about a quarter of their textbooks online, with the bulk still from bookstores.

Students still worry that books ordered from the Internet won't arrive ahead of the start of school, she said. But a bigger reason to buy from a brick-and-mortar store is that if a student drops a course, "the local store will take the books back, with a receipt of course."

Libertowski said that a major contributor to cost was the so-called "bundling" of scholastic material _ a textbook plus a study guide, a CD, a passcode to a Web site. This trend, however, can cut into the resale value, because some bookstores may be hesitant to take the textbook back if they can't replace the other materials separately, she said.

Some students also are shopping for textbooks on price comparison sites such as http://www.bestbookbuys.com, which is operated by Best Web Buys of LaCanada, Calif. Sugi Sorensen, vice president of engineering, said that shoppers can "get prices from the 23 stores we search." Among the offerings are lower-cost, overseas editions, he said.

Heidi O'Connor, 20, who will be a senior this fall at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, said it wasn't unusual for undergraduates to spend $1,000 a year for books, "and for my friends in law school and medical school, it's even worse."

While she does shop at the campus bookstore and local bookstores, she and her friends also use "as many channels as possible," including the marketplace section of the social networking sites Facebook and Craigslist.org.

"What really gets students angry is the buyback problem," O'Connor said. Campus bookstores often will buy back books for just pennies on the dollar, especially if they're not sure the text is going to be used in subsequent semesters.

Her advice to incoming freshmen: "Hammer out your classes, then be a pest if you have to figure out what books you need. E-mail the professor to make sure. It's your education; you're paying for it."

With more time, O'Connor said, students have a better chance of getting lower-cost texts.

"The earlier you can buy, the better, because the inventory of used books tends to go pretty fast," she said. "Or if you want to order online, you have time for the books to get there."

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On the Net:

College Board: http://www.collegeboard.com

The Association of American Publishers: http://www.publishers.org, http://www.textbookfacts.org

National Association of College Stores: http://www.nacs.org