Here is a business for you: how would you like to run a university bookstore? It used to be, at least, that it had a captive audience. Every student at school would have to come to that location for an algebra textbook because no "mom and pop" operation had pockets deep enough to keep such specialty material around town. There are precious few "mom and pop" operations in anyone's town anymore, as we know, but students can now often buy their books online at deep discounts. The web-savvy and organized student can easily find a used copy of the right edition long before a class even starts. The university bookstore is competing in the dark, fighting off phantoms of the so-called "grey" market.
To compete on pricing, the university bookstore must get its orders early, so as to track down its own used copies from students fleeing campus for the summer or from textbook wholesalers. This often means having to harangue professors to make book decisions six months before a class starts. In anticipation of finding used copies, the bookstore orders insufficient quantities of new books. Should it fail to get the desired number of dog-eared, shelf-cocked, and defaced texts from these alternate distributors, it disrupts classes by having inadequate stock during the first week of the new semester. When students pick up a new copy on the bookstore shelves, they often discover a higher price than they anticipated, the publisher or wholesaler having passed along some of its own volatility to campus. While book prices are often atrocious, university bookstore margins remain small.
One way any business might curb its costs is to keep around a little overhead, of course. In the books business, there are potential savings in shipping and returns, and bulk discounts could hedge against inflation. Unfortunately, university bookstores come up against a pretty unusual space crunch: I challenge you to find me a campus with a stockroom not already converted to a dry lab. Moreover, unless a book is used every semester, no one wants to take the risk of getting stuck with an edition that has just gone out of print.
Only a bookstore selling Harry Potter books exclusively will experience certain demand, so imagine how much more pronounced uncertainty is on campus. If a faculty plans on a class of 180 students and only 50 show up, the university bookstore will have a lot of returns. What happens if half those students bought online or pinched a copy from a friend who took the class last semester. Throw another dozen back on the truck. If a class of 150 fills completely, challenging the bookstore to get exactly right the mix of new and used books it has ordered, how might a faculty deciding at the last minute to add 30 new seats affect further that fine balance? What happens when a student, living from paycheque to paycheque waiting tables, ambles into the bookstore in the last weeks of the semester to finally buy the last book taught in a course, only to find that book returned?
As you probably know, the approach to stock diversification in university bookstores makes Heather Reisman look like an amateur. Indeed, there is more justification for this activity on campus than there is in your average Indigo outlet: school spirit is essential to any university. As I recall, the "bookstore" at the University of Texas no longer sells books, just branded merchandise. Insofar as sweatshirts and binders and clocks with school logos can subsidize book retail, I am a strong advocate. But diversification has its limits; I believe the battle has been lost on back catalogue. If I survey the last 50 books I bought, our bookstore carried but one or two. And really, who could blame them? Do I expect our campus bookstore to get involved in the "Where's the most recent Harold Bloom/Harold Bloom is old-fashioned" debate?
Personally, I like the people who run our campus bookstore, and I do everything I can, within reason, to support them. (My professional allowance is not ample enough to support a thirty or forty percent premium on prices, though, to be clear.) But we are, to some extent, working against each other. I try, as much as is pedagogically responsible, to keep book costs in each of my courses to around $100 a term. I post, in advance, the titles and ISBN numbers of the editions I am using, as well as our bookstore prices (new and used). This kind of transparency may well send my students to "grey" suppliers, but I think it would be unfair to the students to do otherwise. The students know (or at least hope) that the bookstore will have adequate stock of the books I use, at those prices, but I suspect that many of them use that information to shop around.
As a result, I surely contribute to the volatility that makes difficult the work of a university bookstore. I will have to make it up in branded coffee mugs, I guess.
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