University Business - April 2010 - (Page 42)

A New Chapter for Campus Bookstores Student Public Interest Research Groups—with the average cost per student at about $900 per year. The problem has not gone unnoticed. Legislators in 34 states have proposed more than 100 bills aimed at controlling textbook expenses, yet few have made much of an impact. A federal law that takes effect in July calls for colleges and universities that get federal aid to provide students with the ISBN and retail price of all required and recommended college textbooks in an online database. While this provides students with some indication of what their textbooks will cost, it doesn’t do much to help them save money. Last year, Congress set aside $10 million to fund textbook rental programs, which have had varying degrees of success from independent campus stores. Students have been able to buy books online for years through such outlets as Amazon and eCampus.com, and they’ve been renting books through independent stores and online vendors such as Chegg.com. But campus stores operated by national distributors like Follett and Barnes & Noble have advantages that the others don’t. As the largest campus bookstore operators in the country, they have the muscle and safety net in place that can let rental programs develop and catch on. Both distributors have launched pilot book rental programs aimed at a small segment of their campus bookstores. Both programs will be expanded this year with more campus stores participating. How Rental PRogRams woRk Just as with other kinds of book rental programs, students get the use of a new textbook at a significantly reduced price for the duration of the semester. However, because they supply a credit card number when they rent a textbook, the store is protected if the book is returned in an unusable condition with pages torn out or defaced. For the major distributors, a book has to be rentable at least twice, and preferably more, to make it profitable. Some books are more amenable to renting than others. Literature and math books that aren’t likely to be updated frequently, for example, are more rentable than books that deal with changing technologies or advances in medicine. Bundled packages that include a CD or DVD may not be rentable because the disks often require a password or serial number to access material. “The decision really comes down to whether a book is going to be readopted in a course or not. Otherwise its tough to put it into the rental program,” says Vince Smyth, director of auxiliary services at the University of North Florida, which operates a Follett store. “One way to ensure that in the long term is to have the faculty actually commit to a three- or four-semester adoption of a text,” he says. “That would make it an automatic choice.” Smyth’s store, which serves more than 16,600 students, made nearly 377 of its 1,987 titles available for rent last fall when it began 42 | April 2010 the program. This year, the number is slightly higher. For Smith at TCC, the college needed to make a commitment to provide as many titles as possible to put in the rental program. “We have a progressive adoption schedule at TCC in that our faculty has to agree to adopt a textbook for at least two, preferably three, years,” she says. “We are very concerned about the cost of education to our students.” But, she says the major distributors have a pretty good idea already what books are purchased most often. Indeed, Follett and Barnes & Noble look at book choices across all their client schools nationwide to determine which ones are likely to be readopted for another term. Additionally, because they are national chains, a rentable book that might not be readopted at one school can be put back into the system elsewhere. ‘Since we started the [rental] program, our bookstore sales went up overall by 13.8 percent. That is significant, considering that our enrollment is up only 4 percent.’ —Teresa Smith, Tallahassee Community College Follett began its rental program last fall in seven pilot stores, which resulted in about $2 million in savings to students in a single term. Barnes & Noble began its rental program in January of this year, so the numbers aren’t fully in yet, but the chain is already planning to expand it to more of its campus stores. “We sell textbooks online and we sell them in our stores,” says Jade Roth, vice president for books at Barnes & Noble. “We know that there is a large percentage of students who are at home or in the dorms or wherever, placing their textbook orders online at two o’clock in the morning,” she says. “If we give them the option to buy that way, we also wanted to give them the option to rent that way. And because we have an on-campus presence as well, we have an advantage over other online booksellers. If a student makes a mistake and orders the wrong book or whatever it may be, they can bring it into our on-campus store and we can solve their problem right away. There’s no shipping time involved, and no back-andforth with e-mails.” (As this issue was going to press, Follett announced that it, too, was launching an online component to its rental program.) savings The bottom line, however, is the bottom line—for students, that is. Rental programs help students save money, says John Hall, vice president for administration and campus operations at The University of Texas at Arlington. “We’ve been trying hard to maintain affordability for all our universitybusiness.com http://www.eCampus.com http://www.Chegg.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - April 2010

University Business - April 2010
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Financial Aid
Internet Technology
Certified for Safety
Managing the Enterprise on Limited Resources
A New Chapter for Campus Bookstores
Independent Outlook
What's New
End Note

University Business - April 2010

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