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College bookstore feeling pinch from online sales
May 5, 2009 | 8:15 am
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By Paul Biba
Here is a story from todays Shelf Awareness. Anyone interested in the retail book trade should be a subscriber to their excellent newsletter.
In a story about the requirement of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, passed last year, that college-owned and -operated bookstores disseminate ISBNs and retail prices for course materials as of July 2010, Inside Higher Education noted that this “poses new challenges for colleges, college stores, and the firms that operate college stores (and the store Web sites) under contract.”
Already, Inside Higher Education wrote, “Student Monitor’s fall 2008 survey of full-time undergraduates reveals that 16 percent of undergraduates ‘bought most of their textbooks online,’ up from 12 percent in fall 2007. Additionally, Student Monitor reports that ‘the share of students who purchase most of their textbooks from their on-campus bookstore continues to trend down: fewer than six in ten students (57 percent) purchased most of their textbooks at their on campus book store,’ compared to 64 percent in fall 2006 and down from 72 percent in fall 2005.”
And online booksellers are becoming more sophisticated: “Apple’s student-oriented iPhone ad broadcast during the NCAA men’s basketball championship game on April 6 highlighted SnapTell, an iPhone app that supports ‘photo commerce’: take a picture of a book (including college textbooks) and the SnapTell app will link you to multiple Web sites that sell the book. On the institutional side, Verba Software, a Cambridge, Mass., firm launched by some recent Harvard grads, offers an application that links course lists to IBSNs and then searches the Web for the best prices for new and used textbooks and course tomes.”
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Comments:
College Bookstores have such an incredible markup it’s obscene. $10-40 over retail. With bad service and rude employees (I’m not just talking about my school’s bookstore). I’m glad that they feel the pinch from online retailers. They aren’t in the book business, they’re in the business of exploiting college kids who MUST have the books they’re selling, and they know it, so they feel as though they can treat students however they like and charge whatever they want.
I may be of a different generation but it was just the same when I went to Columbia from 1962-66. I have absolutely no, repeat no, love for college bookstores. (and after Columbia you should have seen how the Fordham Law School bookstore ripped us all off in 1966-1969). Unfortunately, in those days we had no alternatives. Their death will not be mourned (and that includes, of course, the textbook publishers.)