Savvy shoppers save at online textbook stores

As she lugged a shopping basket packed with heavy and expensive textbooks around Barnes ‘ Noble at Boston University this past Monday, Pam Sywak longed for the beginning of last semester, when she purchased all of her textbooks online.

Readying herself to cough up about $500 for books, the College of Arts and Sciences sophomore said she wished she had stuck with the internet this year.

Sywak made her first foray into online purchases over winter break last year, when she bought her textbooks through the online bookstore half.com after fellow CAS sophomore Bora Panduku recommended the service.

‘I ended up saving a lot of money, and it was a lot easier,’ Sywak said, estimating she saved about $200 when she shopped online.

Panduku, an online book-buying veteran, discovered the benefits of buying books online in high school and decided to try to find her college textbooks online before she began her freshman year at BU.

Last fall, she spent a total of about $150 on her books – a price any BU student would consider a steal.

‘Sometimes you just get lucky,’ she said.

Internet book buying has not severely affected profits at Barnes ‘ Noble, according to BU store manager Mike Gore, who said he has not seen any marked change in textbook sales since the books began being sold online.

‘Does it affect us in some matter? Yes. Is it a major part of our business? No, it’s a minor part,’ he said, noting the only significant changes in sales are when there is a vast increase in enrollment, as there was with last year’s freshman class.

But based on the double- and triple-digit sales increases online booksellers have reported over the past few years, more and more college students are learning what Sywak and Panduku have learned: buying textbooks from an online bookseller can often be cheaper and more convenient than navigating the stacks at Barnes ‘ Noble and shelling out piles of money to cover the retail mark-up of textbooks.

But, booksellers and student shoppers caution, it is important to do some research into the company’s policies and to comparison shop before typing your credit card number into an online order form.

MONEY MATTERS

The number-one reason students buy textbooks online is to save money.

Many internet booksellers offer both new and used books, as Barnes ‘ Noble does. And often both types of books can be found at a lower cost online. But how is it possible to buy the exact same book at a significantly lower cost?

Roger Weaver, vice president of sales and marketing for eCampus.com, explained that textbooks do not have a suggested retail price listed on the back like novels do. He said this allows college bookstores to mark up their prices to ‘pretty much whatever they want to.’

To make their products more appealing, Weaver said eCampus.com does not mark up the price of its books and frequently compares its prices to campus bookstores and other online stores.

‘We make sure we’re either equal to or lower than they are for the same product,’ he said.

Other companies partner specifically with educational publishers and wholesalers to keep the costs down, according to Brian Jacobs, founder and CEO of Akademos, Inc., which operates TextbookX.com, another online bookseller.

‘We eliminate a few more steps than what a national chain would have involved in its supply chain,’ he said. ‘While we partner with the publishers, we don’t incur some of the expenses some of these large retail chains incur because of the cost of their infrastructure. We try to work outside of that model, which can only be done through the internet.’

SIZING UP USED BOOKS

In addition to offering lower prices, internet booksellers make other customer service efforts as well. Students often flip through the used textbooks on the shelves at stores like Barnes ‘ Noble to find one in usable condition and avoid paying a significantly higher price for a brand-new book. Because students shopping online cannot review book conditions themselves before their purchase, some online booksellers offer descriptions of the book’s condition on their websites.

Bookbyte.com offers detailed descriptions of the quality of each book, including the amount of highlighting, whether pages are frayed or loose and whether or not CD-ROMs or study guides are included.

‘The reason we do that is that you can’t see the book and we want you to know exactly what you are buying before you buy it,’ said Mark Freed, certified store professional for Bookbyte.com.

TextbookX.com offers a service that allows sellers to list and describe their books on the site. Sellers sell directly to customers using TextbookX.com’s services, but TextbookX.com does not have control over the price or the condition of the book.

While the seller sets the price, the company ‘gives them some guidelines,’ Jacobs said. ‘We show them what the retail price of the book is, what the lowest price of the used book is, what the new price is. We give them various points of orientation to price the book, but ultimately it’s up to them.’

TextbookX.com also provides sample photos of books in various conditions so the seller can choose a photo to accurately describe the condition of his or her book.

Once the textbook sells, TextbookX.com notifies the seller, who receives the amount he or she asked for, minus a commission deducted by TextbookX.com.

Although TextbookX.com lets the buyer and seller choose their prices without any regulation from the company, Jacobs said the company can and will step in to mediate any problems, though negotiations rarely reach that point.

The condition of used books is placed completely in the hands of a quality control staff at eCampus.com.

Weaver, of eCampus, said he is confident customers will be satisfied with the condition of their books because most students selling their textbooks to the company are familiar with online shopping and know what is considered acceptable.

‘I see worse books when we go out on college campuses … than I see sold back to us on the internet,’ Weaver said.

Panduku, the online book buying devotee, agreed that the conditions of books sold online are often better than those sold at Barnes ‘ Noble. She credited this phenomenon to the ratings that help buyers choose sellers.

SELL BACK FOR CASH

Even better than saving money is earning it, and internet booksellers offer students the opportunity to do both.

TextbookX.com’s Jacobs noted that students can often receive three times the amount online as they can on campus when they sell back their books.

Weaver said eCampus.com pays more money for newly printed books because they do not yet have many used copies of those texts.

The popularity of the textbook and the subject matter of the book are also factors in determining the prices because some books, such as equine texts, have longer shelf lives and are harder to come by than an introductory biology textbook, Weaver said.

Internet buyback helps students who get approval from a professor to use an older version of a textbook, Bookbyte’s Freed said. While campus bookstores often do not carry these older, less expensive editions, online booksellers like BookByte.com do because they have paid students for them.

‘The publisher doesn’t like the used book industry because they don’t get any money out of it,’ he added.

Therefore, new editions are issued every 18 to 24 months and older versions are pulled off of the shelves at campus bookstores.

SHIPPING CONCERNS

Most online booksellers offer shipping by way of the United States Postal Service or United Parcel Service. Many companies offer free USPS shipping on their books.

Freed said the number-one concern he hears from students buying books online is they do not think they can receive their books fast enough after placing the order. But he said 80 percent of their orders ship the same day they are ordered online and the rest are shipped the next day, depending on what time the order was placed.

And nearly all online companies offer upgrades to faster shipping at an added cost.

While shipping adds to the total, some students, like Panduku, say the convenience outweighs the cost.

‘Shipping doesn’t make a difference when you’re buying a book for half-price,’ she said.

ARCHAIC QUEUING

Despite the growing popularity of purchasing textbooks online, Gore said there are good reasons to continue to shop at Barnes ‘ Noble.

‘The reason regardless of [a student’s] reason for going on the web, is the guarantee to get the right books at the store,’ he said.

Gore also said many of the courses at BU also require supplemental materials, which Barnes ‘ Noble carries but online stores likely do not.

Furthermore, the university tells the bookstore how many students are expected to take each course each semester and Barnes ‘ Noble orders a sufficient number of books to provide for each student.

Online booksellers do not have these statistics and could run out of the textbooks a student needs, Gore said.

Freed acknowledged this is true. While Bookbyte.com has many different titles, they don’t carry everything, or hundreds of each book. Therefore, they can fulfill the needs of a lot of students, but they’re not able to supply three to four classes of students who need the same text.

But Jacobs, of TextbookX.com, stressed that said the internet is ‘a natural fit for the textbook market’ because it is easy for customers to find information about what they want to buy and search for its availability.

Sywak, who did not have much luck finding bargains this semester at Barnes ‘ Noble, said she spent $130 on an economics textbook that her friend Panduku found for $50 last semester– and vowed to resume her online purchases next semester.

‘It’s altogether easier,’ she said as she shifted her shopping basket from one side to the other. ‘You don’t have to come here and deal with the crowds and wait in line.’