Used books save money

By Liz Weeker and David Wilson

As text book prices continue to soar and publishers have made no promise to reverse this trend, students have returned to alternatives to the Santa Clara book store: online venders.

According to Joseph Moore, textbook manager at the campus bookstore, the university has no bargaining power with publishers and therefore must pass along the high textbook prices to students. Moore attributes the unfettered rise in book costs to a consolidation in the publishing market.

"There is less competition. There used to be like 3,000 publishers and now there are something like 300," he said.

Aside from this theory, Moore does not understand why prices are rising multiple times over inflation.

"I'll order five more books into the quarter, and the price has increased 10 dollars," Moore said. "The net price has increased 10 dollars in a matter of months for a single textbook."

Santa Clara students have found ways around the high prices by purchasing used books from the bookstore, buying from online retailers like Amazon.com, and using book trading services like Dogears.net.

Associated Students has focused on helping students circumvent the bookstore rather than trying to lower campus prices. The student organization played a role in bringing Dogears.net to Santa Clara nearly two years ago. The site facilitates book sales between students, enabling them to post books they want to sell and browse for books they need for other classes.

"The trend I've noticed is that students are researching online and buying their books online," Associated Student President Annie Selak said. "But if this (bookstore prices) is something students are concerned about, then you better believe we would respond and create a committee."

But Moore says there is nothing he nor anyone else can do to affect textbook prices unless that person is a publisher. For him, selling more used books is the best way for the book store to help students.

In comparison to the other schools Moore has worked at such as University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, and Boston University, he's found Santa Clara's professors to be very cooperative in coordinating affordable book prices for students. In the past he'd seen faculties that didn't care what students paid for their books.

Moore sends memos out to Santa Clara faculty asking them to get him their book order as soon as possible so that he can offer good buy back values. He has found that many professors have insisted on using older versions of the books because they realize that publishers try to charge students higher prices by passing off updated books that vary little from the year before.

Moore hopes to increase that figure in following years and eventually see used book sales outnumber those of new books.

*Contact Liz Weeker at eweeker@scu.edu or David Wilson at dfwilson@scu.edu.