Late book orders, an annual pain for students

There's nothing fun about buying textbooks, about placing a $600 dent in your wallet or about standing in line to do so, arms weighted down by the sheer mass of an Introductory Physics textbook. While some might call this an inevitable part of the semester, Bookstore Manager Cathy Black-Benson and her colleagues are hoping to relieve some financial burden by spreading awareness of an easily ameliorated flaw in the process: professors submitting book requests far past the Bookstore's deadline.

"The best way to increase the amount of used books [available to students] is getting book orders from faculty as soon as possible," explained Black-Benson. "Professors need to know how it works." No Vassar professors were willing to comment for this article.

The bookstore acquires used books in two ways: through on-campus buyback and through used book wholesalers. In both circumstances, plentiful and successful acquisition relies on when the bookstore becomes aware of the books it must order.

"What is so frustrating is when we buy back a book for wholesale price, say $10, and then we ship them to a wholesaler in Missouri," explained Black-Benson. "Three weeks later a professor comes in and orders that book. We can't just get it back."

"We need to know what books are being used on this campus so that we can pay 50 percent to anyone who wants to sell them back to us," explained Black-Benson on the Bookstore's buyback process. "We can't buy them back at 50 percent and keep them in stock if professors haven't told us what they're going to use."

When ordering from wholesalers, time carries equal significance. In the wholesale market, the Vassar Bookstore faces competition from all of the other institutions seeking to provide used books for its students. If another school places their requests earlier, they will have access to the most books at the cheapest prices.

"The longer we are in this used book wholesale market, the more used books we're going to get. So again, if the faculty member tells us earlier—and we can be hunting for used books for months—we're going to have a lot more success in getting them. If a professor tells us a week before classes what books they need, we're not going to have any time," commented Black-Benson.

A late faculty request may mean that a student selling back a textbook reusable at Vassar may only receive 10 percent of its original value when they should receive 50 percent of the original value. This becomes a burden for both the student seller and the future student buyer, who will not have access to this used book. In fact, recent statistics from the Barnes and Noble Collegiate franchises reveal that Vassar submits book requests later than its peer institutions. For the current semester, the Bookstore asked that requests for spring semester textbooks be submitted by Nov. 12, 2009. As of that date, only 10.9 percent of book orders had been received. The national average for Barnes and Noble's college stores was 50.8 percent.

While this gap is certainly alarming, Vassar Student Association (VSA) Vice President for Operations Brian Farkas '10 attributes the gap between orders submitted and the books that will eventually be required for classes in part to Vassar's unique curricular flexibility.

"50.8 percent, I would say that that number is too high for Vassar. If you are operating a bookstore at an enormous university, there are many more classes that are going to be offered every single semester, every single year. And for us, that's not always the case," explained Farkas. "I feel like our ideal number, if there is such a thing, should probably be lower than the 50.8 percent and certainly higher than the 10.9 percent, because that's pretty pathetic."

Farkas and his fellow VSA Council members responded proactively to these statistics earlier this fall with an e-mail to the faculty. The e-mail outlined the financial ramifications late book requests have on students and encouraged faculty to consider timely book requests as a "fair and relatively painless way of reducing burden on students."

Both Black-Benson and Farkas noted the e-mail's success in eliciting faculty responses and hoped that this becomes a positive trend that can continue to benefit students in these difficult financial times.

"[The e-mail] was very effective in getting a lot of faculty members to submit their book orders right after they saw that e-mail. I think that in the future something we will have to institutionalize, at least until our culture is more in line with the norm, is to have the VSA send that reminder e-mail regularly," said Farkas.

With the Fall 2011 April book order deadline just around the corner, we can all hope that Vassar faculty will rise to the occasion and that all of our wallets can be a little fuller at the end of next semester's textbook purchasing period.