Student Bookstores Beware, Amazon Comes To Purdue Campus

First time accepted submitter Kilroy1218 writes After freezing tuition past their original deadline Purdue University announced a partnership with Amazon today which aside from greatly competitive book pricing "will bring staffed customer order pickup and drop-off locations to Purdue's campus, as well as expedited shipping benefits phased in over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year." “This relationship is another step in Purdue’s efforts to make a college education more affordable for our students,” said President Mitch Daniels. “With the pressure on college campuses to reduce costs, this new way of doing business has the potential to change the book-buying landscape for students and their families.”

Comments

Misleading Freezing Statement

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't change the tuition after a certain deadline, they extended the time within which their tuition won't change.

In addition, this doesn't do anything to change the book-buying landscape for students. Students always had the option of buying books online through Amazon.

Well

[Mashiki]

Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere. Gotta do something with those $4-15k/yearly in books after you're done using them...and getting $250 back.

Re:Well

[Obfuscant]

Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere.

Around here the buyback is done by folks who set tents up on the streetcorners, not the bookstore.

Re:Well

[Albanach]

The US textbook market is crazy.

An easy example is Campbell's Biology Plus MasteringBiology - a pretty standard 1st year Biology textbook. Amazon UK price $87.56. Price for the US equivalent is $190.40.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to make apples to apples comparisons - you are comparing a text alone to a text with online support suite, something that costs around $75-125 without buying the physical book.

Here's the probability text I'll be teaching out of this fall:
http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-Probability-9th/dp/032179477X/ $145.79
http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Course-Probability-Sheldon-Ross/dp/032179477X/ $191.80

Similarly, here's the most popular 3-semester calculus text:
http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/0538497815/ $223.41
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/0538497815/ $270.53

Re:Well

[wiredlogic]

It costs extra to have editors redact all the bits about evolution.

Re:Well

[hazem]

Amazon already buys a lot of textbooks back, and for about the same crummy price the school bookstore gives you. If you look over at the right side, there's often a "trade in your item" with a proposed price.

Re:Well

[drinkypoo]

Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere. Gotta do something with those $4-15k/yearly in books after you're done using them...and getting $250 back.

If your student bookstore will buy the book back, Amazon probably will too. The bookstore won't even always take the books, e.g. if they don't think they can sell them. Meanwhile, you are free to list your book on Amazon yourself, and Amazon will help you sell it to another student.

Where's the money?

[Nate the greatest]

Here's an interesting detail not in the original post. According to what the bookstore director told me, the UC Davis bookstore only earned around $140 thousand in affiliate commissions in the first 6 months. Considering that the bookstore had revenues of around 20 million dollars last fiscal year (July to June 2014), the partnership doesn't look like it is worth anything to the bookstore. http://the-digital-reader.com/...

Re:Where's the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing revenues to profits. $140k in commissions looks a lot nicer than $0 in commissions for those that buy from Amazon and at 2 percent commission, the revenues through this portal amounted to $7 million, or about 1/3 of the amount sold directly.

Hachete

[goombah99]

Will they allow professor's to assign Hachette textbooks? Can student's order Hachette study guides?

Re:Hachete

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind that, will they stock Eats, Shoots & Leaves and other guides to avoiding the use of the Grocer's Apostrophe?

Retard.

$4-15K/year

[NotQuiteReal]

Holy Cow! What is your course of study where the books are that much?

I don't know what the books cost - my kid handles it himself, but I haven't heard the outcry I would expect for a 2nd year Mechanical Engineering major to be screaming if it were anywhere near that.

At any rate, I do know that he buys his books "online" (Amazon and others) and may or may not sell them at the end of the term, since the online purchases were so much cheaper to start with vs list price at the campus book store.

(Not to mention the nasty habit of "revisions" happening all the time. I do remember one $200-ish AP Chem book for HS we got online for quite a bit less... had the same material, but the pg numbers were off and the exercises were a bit different... obvious changes to make the book "obsolete". I wonder how much is the Author and how much is the Publisher making these minor tweaks to create artificial obsolescence?)

Re:$4-15K/year

[93 Escort Wagon]

Another shady practice is faculty writing their own textbook and then requiring it be used when they teach related courses, when it appears there's a well-accepted standard text in use by 90% of other schools where the particular subject is taught.

Re:$4-15K/year

[anarcobra]

When I was doing Electrical Engineering we needed about 10 to 15 books per year on average I think. Each book was between 100 and 200 Euros on average. Of course there were the usual texts by the professor or whatever, but those weren't that expensive usually. As you can imagine, by the second year most students didn't bother buying all the books anymore. Usually all you needed was the slides and maybe a couple of pages of the book that you could copy from somewhere. If during the classes you noticed that the book really would be useful, that's when you'd buy it.

Re:$4-15K/year

[AthanasiusKircher]

Not to mention the nasty habit of "revisions" happening all the time. I do remember one $200-ish AP Chem book for HS we got online for quite a bit less... had the same material, but the pg numbers were off and the exercises were a bit different... obvious changes to make the book "obsolete". I wonder how much is the Author and how much is the Publisher making these minor tweaks to create artificial obsolescence?

I know some people who have written standard textbooks in a couple different fields. The general impression I've gotten from them is that they are usually NOT in favor of creating new editions all the time. Generally there are some kinks to work out in the first edition, but definitely by the second or third edition, things should be pretty set. The authors I've talked to have mentioned they are often under pressure from publishers to make changes to justify new editions. And, in fact, that's often why you see books start to accumulate new authors after a few editions -- it used to be "Intro to X by A" and now it's "Intro to X by A and B, 4th ed." and then a few years later it's "Intro to X by A, B, and C, 9th ed." Sometimes the old authors just think the book is fine, and they finally say no to doing anything new, so the book gets handed off to someone else to "revise" and bring in some new ideas or exercises.

People often overestimate the profits that professors earn from textbooks. Sure, those who write the really standard books in very popular fields (like the standard intro calc or bio textbooks or whatever) are probably making a lot of royalties. But once you get beyond those intro classes or get into more obscure fields, the number of copies sold may not be that big, particularly if there is competition among textbooks (which there usually is, even in smaller fields).

I'm not saying they aren't making money. But I've heard from multiple textbook authors (smaller markets) that they aren't making enough money to justify doing new editions and revisions as much as publishers would like them to. And keep in mind that most academics see their jobs as primarily research, not textbook writing, so they'd rather be doing something for real in their field rather than coming up with another set of stupid exercise questions for an intro book.

So, I'd say publishers are definitely in favor of creating artificial obsolescence. Authors? Maybe sometimes, but not as often as you might think.

Re:why the fuck cant purdue

[digsbo]

You're kidding, right? Don't you know there are gentlemen's agreements between doctoral programs and publishers and schools to require the "newest" edition of the book each year just so the publisher and PhD can charge for new books which have changed only to change pagination? You think they'd actually want to save kids money? Do you also believe that universities want to educate students to help them think critically and independently?

Misleading Freezing Statement

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else is going to happen...Amazon will temporarily save the students money, the prices will go down by cutting out the bookstore overhead, and the publishers will jack up (or off) their overpriced books so that they cost from Amazon what they did from ye olde bricke ande mortare store. And plenty of people will lose their jobs to the Amazon robots just as before.

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[RabidReindeer]

Their professors' course material should all be online, and in many cases it already is. That way it is accessible to everyone who needs it and pays for it.

For the life of the course. If, Chthulu forbid! you actually intended to learn something from the course, and wanted to go back and review material after the term ended, often your online resources have been terminated.

I've got books from courses taken years ago, since I tended not to sell back. They aren't even remotely related to my career or daily life. But occasionally I'll take one off the shelf and page through one. They're a lot more entertaining now that I'm not under pressure to use them for class.

Lesson from a poor student

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in college I had to pay every single cent of the school fees / book / a roof over my head / food, everything by myself
 
I had no parents to foot the bill for me nor any church or any charitable organization for I was a refugee from China freshly landed in America, and I was paying the "International Student" tuition fee which was 10X the school fee the "local students" were paying
 
Other than working 3 different jobs while studying full time, I had to find ways to skim on expenses, and one of the ways was on books
 
A lot of professors earn their side incomes by forcing students to get the latest edition of school text --- for example, Version 14 of an economic book
 
What I did was I went to old book stores and search for previous versions of the same book (by the same author), and bought version 5 of the same book (couples of years old, of course), and went back to the school, borrow the newest edition from my classmate and started a chapter by chapter (sometimes page by page) comparison.
 
Most often the difference between the old edition and the newest version was an additional chapter and/or some revisions of some other chapters, for those I simply xerox the pages from the new edition and clipped them onto the old edition that I bought
 
The difference in price however, was staggering. The latest edition might cost upwards to $150 or so, per book, while the old edition which I got from old book store may cost me only $12
 
Another method is to "borrow" the book from the school library and then "forget" to return that book for the entire semester
 
Those were amongst the many tricks I used to get by my college days

Re:How long before Amazon...

[Richard_at_work]

If you are referring to the Hachette spat, you might want to reexamine your understanding of the situation - no Hachette books have been removed from sale, you can still buy every Hachette book that you could before. What Amazon did do is remove pre-orders from unreleased Hachette books - you can still buy them when they are released, they just aren't allowing you to preorder - they are under no obligation to allow preorders on books either.