Barnes and Noble at Boston University has extended the due date for rented books in an effort to accommodate students whose books were left on campus after the cancelation of in-person classes amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The new rental due date will be July 15, but students will not be charged for late books as long as they are returned before the end of the day on Sept. 12, according to an April 17 email from Barnes and Noble.
Students have the option to print out a free shipping label to return books. Kurt Mahnke, general manager of Barnes and Noble at BU, said this option has always been available, but that it’s especially useful and being encouraged now that students are away from campus.
“That’s communicated in the emails we send out to students, the reminder emails and… it’s always been on our website,” Mahnke said. “Obviously we’re more prominently promoting it based on the fact that students are not here and it’s really their only way of getting the books back to us.”
Mahnke said that if they don’t have enough returned books by the deadline, Barnes and Noble will accommodate the needs of students by purchasing more from a wholesaler and continuing to expand digital access.
“We’re really trying to encourage students, if they have access to the materials, to return them by July 15,” he said. “If we don’t have the books by then, we have to get them somewhere else to make sure that we have material for the fall semester.”
When the books do arrive, staff will be letting them sit until the virus is no longer active, Mahnke said.
“We’re currently letting those materials sit for five days,” he said. “Then, our employees are using gloves to check them back in and ensure that they’ve been sanitized properly.”
Barnes and Noble locations at colleges across the country extended their deadlines, but each school has unique needs depending on if they are residential or commuter schools, he also said.
“The challenge at BU was that the first announcement asking students not to come back to campus happened during spring break,” Mahnke said. “There’s going to be stranded rental books in students’ dorm rooms and really across the country, most likely. We want to make sure that we’re working with students to ensure that they are able to get those books back to us without being charged.”
Michelle DeMaio, a company spokeswoman for Barnes and Noble Education, Inc. wrote in an email that the needs of a range of universities were considered when setting new rental deadlines.
“The decision to extend rental deadlines was made on a Barnes and Noble College company-wide basis,” DeMaio wrote, “although we worked closely with our individual stores to determine solutions that worked best for their individual campuses.”
In the meantime, many students are accessing their textbooks online.
Kristina Massari, director of Public and Media Relations at Cengage, a company that provides digital copies of textbooks, wrote in an email that more than 200,000 students have accessed textbooks through their platform.
“For courses that have been disrupted by the COVID crisis (and started on or before April 10),” Massari wrote, “Cengage is offering students free access to all its digital platforms and ebooks through Cengage Unlimited, for the remainder of the spring semester. This includes more than 22,000 eTextbooks, digital learning platforms/access codes and study guides.”
