Shocking, students are being ripped off for books

[lsvtec]

http://www.komotv.com/stories/29552.htm

It hads taken people this long to figure out that we are being bent over for text books???

 

[JDMilan]

fuck, I have been getting fucked over by my local college bookstore for years.

Mine usually cost 70-120 per book, then when you want to sell the shit back it's at like 30 bucks per book, then sometimes they don't even take them back.


I have found that by selling your recently bought new book but used for one semester on Amazon you only lose like 5-10 bucks which is a much better deal.

 

[B16]

ya, my last calculus book i bought was $130 used

 

[dohcvtec_accord]

Nice for them to publish this 5 years after I graduated. <_<

 

[posol]

the best is when they give you $5 for it when you sell it back, and next semester, its $80 used. bookstore = t3h profit.

 

[CRX_B16B]

one of my professors was talking to a sales rep for prentice hall and he said the aveage college bookstore markup is about 33% and about 44% for books with shrink wrap. that fookin suck

 

[lsvtec]

Case in point, the text book for my Software Development class costs $115 from our bookstore. From amazon.com it is a whopping $29.99. Where is the extra $95 coming from???

 

[Trinity]

and this is why i haven't gone to school yet, too much money that i don' thave

 

[swanny]

This semester I shelled out $400 in books, and this is only for 4 classes. And i still havent gotten any back from my $100 Macro Econ book and my $150 Psych book i "sold" to the used book store.

 

[smooth_criminal]

Originally posted by CRX_B16B@Jan 30 2004, 12:22 PM
one of my professors was talking to a sales rep for prentice hall and he said the aveage college bookstore markup is about 33% and about 44% for books with shrink wrap. that fookin suck

I can tell you this. I work in a corperate office that has about 70 retail stores across the US. A small part of our stores are books about 396k. And part of my job is to buy books and have them sold in the stores. I can almost 100% garentee that they are selling the books for more then 33% of 44%. In the retail world everything works by points not %. 1 point = 2 %. It more likely that the book stores are marking the books up 33 points making it 66%. This is how publishing pricing works from the big dogs in the book world like Simon & shulster (biggest publisher in the USA and oldest). If you look at the inside cover and see a price or on the back of the book, $14.95 this is the retail price and everony knows that, but what you don't know is that the store that is selling it only paid at the most $7.48 and that is at the VERY VERY most. the bigger the store or chain the less they pay but they still have to sell it for the cover price because they aren't aloud to flood the market with lower pricing. So next time you buy a book just remember that books have the second highest mark up in the USA, The Electronics buisness is the is the lowest believe it or not!!!

 

[Seany-izzle]

sometimes they come out with new editions, so you cant even buy a used version. the most any book cost me was this semester....managerial accounting = 140 bucks, ranking second was marketing management = 124. total for this semester rang in at close to 500

 

[swanny]

Originally posted by Seany-izzle@Jan 30 2004, 01:43 PM
sometimes they come out with new editions, so you cant even buy a used version. the most any book cost me was this semester....managerial accounting = 140 bucks, ranking second was marketing management = 124. total for this semester rang in at close to 500

Check the used book store for older editions, pretty much all that changes are some of the stats. A kid in my sociology class bought the edition prior to the required one and it saved him like $75 and the book was only off by one page, all of the photos were the same.

 

[phunky.buddha]

My Indian co-workers have their families buy $80 books for $6 back in India, then ship them over... they're paperback editions (which I've never seen here), but they're current and brand new.

 

[DarkHand]

Originally posted by Calesta@Jan 30 2004, 12:51 PM
My Indian co-workers have their families buy $80 books for $6 back in India, then ship them over... they're paperback editions (which I've never seen here), but they're current and brand new.

The publishers probably outsourced the printing work

 

[phunky.buddha]

For their market, yes. It makes sense to print books locally.

 

[reckedracing]

there also seems to be a direct link to the price of the text book as compared to the expected lifetime earnings of the major...

for example, my accounting books were always over 100...
i was looking at close to 600 a semester...

but if you go take art classes or any of that bullshit the books are like 20 to 50 bucks...
unless its an upper level art history hardcover glossy pictures type, then you;re fucked...