The e-mail began going out a couple of months ago. The doorknob signs soon followed, as West Virginia University’s Bookstore staff began the annual campaign of gently reminding faculty of a key semester deadlinegetting their book orders (they’re known in the industry asadoptions) in to buyers for the coming summer and fall semesters.
This is a real mission,Bookstore manager David Lang said.We understand that everyone gets really busy this time of year, but if they get those adoptions to us now, everybody benefits.
Everybody, indeedespecially students.
New book orders submitted now by faculty mean students get more money when they sell their books back to the Bookstore at the end of this semester.
That’s because of supply and demand, Lang said, especially in the core classes that have hundreds of students and a reading list that might not change all that much from semester to semester.
WVU ’s Bookstore, Lang said, can pay up to 50 percent of the cover price for any book, provided the tome has been turned in early enough to meet the demand. The book also has to be relatively unscathed, he said, with a good cover and binding, and pages reasonably free from penciled notes in the margin and underscores from the highlight marker.
Fifty-percent is a good return for anyone,Lang said,but it’s like gold to a college student. That can ease the pain they felt when they paid $100 for a book at the start of the semester.
Instructions who submit their book lists early can also escape the pain of publisher’s shipping errors, or the worst of the worse-case scenarios: a book that’s out-of-stock with an order that can’t be filled until well into the semester.
The ones that are frustrating for us are when we finally get the list of adoptions after finals and all the students have gone home,he said.You know then that when students come back, they just aren’t going to make as much money on their books from the semester before.
David Lang knows his college bookstore and others like it across the country are facing a Goliath-sized opponent in the whole buyback process, since publishing companies are naturally intent on blowing out the used-book market altogether.
That’s why they always change the editions of the books,Lang said.You add a new chapter, or a new appendix, and there’s your �€~new’edition. And �€~new’costs more than �€~used.’
And instructors, just like everyone else, can be dazzled by guerilla marketing packages foisted upon them by publishers anxious for their business. Those are the deals that offer whiz-bang extras like (presumably) free study guides and multimedia CDs to supplement the textbooks.
The trouble with that,Lang said,is that there’s no such thing as �€~free.’All they do is mark up the cover price of the book to underwrite the costs of the study guide and CD.
The Bookstore has countered with some guerilla marketing of its own with the buyback campaign that used pictures from college protest days with depictions of students holding altered signs readingWe want more used textbooks!Bookstore staffers are also sporting green buttons that simply readRecycleas in recycling books for bucks.
And the Bookstore Web site ( www.wvu.bkstore.com ) features a link with listings of books already available for buyback, with hundreds of titles already noted, from Aristotle to Kurt Vonnegut, from physics to landscape architecture.
We’re also encouraging students to not be shy,Lang said.We’re always telling them to keep at their professors to see if they’ve gotten their adoptions in to us.
With textbook prices going up and upthe industry generally hikes prices three times a yearLang said instructors who get those orders in early and students who take care of the texts they purchase can at least get some piece of mind, plus a little cash, as they continue to be participants in a very competitive, and expensive, process.
We’re here to help,Lang said.At WVU students pay on average of $400-$600 a semester for books. And that isn’t figured into tuition. The least we can do is offer some breaks anywhere we can.