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College bookstores are the biggest rip off!!

B

bubbadu

Diamond Member
I had two classes today and I bought textbooks for both.. one a programming and the other an ecomnics class. I spend $180 on the two.... at the end of the programming I punched them up on amazon used books and they both started at $6.00!!!! that is just insane.... I could care less about the condition of the book... but even "like new" were about 10 bucks. I fell bad for the girl who sat next to me.. she lost her reciept and now can't bring hers back. 🙁 I just wanted to point out how much I HATE bookstores and how much of a fvcking markup they have. Those books will be going back as soon as the new ones get in.... screw paying retail.

</rant>

-Bubbadu
 
You must be a freshman. Lesson learned, indeed. Buy books from on-line etailers and try and buy them used because you most likely won't need them after that one class.

Some people even photocopy the entire book even though they really shouldn't. 😉
 
Textbooks in college itself are a joke. Upwards of $100 for a book? Why can't they just use regular books and people could get them from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.? It's an industry begging to be regulated by the Feds! :Q
 
Yup. Sell it to you for $80, but it back for $10, sell it back to the next group at $80, etc.

What a deal for them.
 
Originally posted by: conjur
Textbooks in college itself are a joke. Upwards of $100 for a book? Why can't they just use regular books and people could get them from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.? It's an industry begging to be regulated by the Feds! :Q
Click to expand...

 
So why didn't you check amazon prices in time to buy them used?

> much I HATE bookstores and how much of a fvcking markup they have.
Publishers set the price, bookstores buy at a discount off of that price and take the difference as profit just like with every other product you buy. The bookstores don't have a particularly high markup, it's the retail price that is high.

I give your rant a 0.5 for completely missing the target.
 
yes remember when i was in college..it was pain to get the books from the college book store...back then i didnt know better about getting used book elsewhere..i was a freshman...i wanted to get used books too..but didn't know a place that got used books..
well..after the college year i gave them away to the local library ..
 
Just make sure that you are getting the right editions off line because they sell the older editions for much cheaper than the new ones. I bet you anything that the ones you found are out of date editions or new editions are out.
 
What a bunch of people and I did in college was, one of us would buy a book, and then someone else would "borrow" the book when taking the class a semester or however many semesters afterwards. There are always going to be a few people who like to keep their textbooks.

Or you just buy used. Best way is to buy directly from someone who took the class, like on the last day of the semester when they're done with finals and don't give a s#1+ anymore and will sell it to you for cheap but better than the ripoff bookstores so they can have some quick cash to get wasted that night. 😉
 
sigh, i just dished out $100 on a book today, only to find out that its against the law to resell it (they say the book is part of some software license and that its illegal to be resold, etc) there go my chances of getting some pocket change back by selling the book 🙁
 
I sell all mine on amazon when done. I hate the fact that it's extremely hard to get a list of books/isbn's for the courses I am taking. They just want you to buy them at the bookstore and I don' t have time to wait around for the books to ship.
 
It's been a long time since I was in college, but back then my fraternity would buy the books and we'd all share and pass them down to the next group, with notes.

Fraternities were good for something besides drinking.
 
The bookstore at my school published the booklists extremely close to the start of classes. And when I asked to get the ISBN numbers of the books, they would not give them to me because it was against "policy". WTF.
 
Originally posted by: jmcoreymv
The bookstore at my school published the booklists extremely close to the start of classes. And when I asked to get the ISBN numbers of the books, they would not give them to me because it was against "policy". WTF.
Click to expand...
They have to pay shipping and restocking fees for any unsold books they ship back to the publisher, so the policy is probably there to make it easier for them to guess how many copies of a book to order.

It's still a messed up system I'll agree. Textbook lists with ISBNs should be online, at least a month in advance, and campus bookstores should try to compete (and predict how much to order) by offering preorder discounts rather than hiding the ISBNs.

By the way, one reason why new copies are so expensive is because of the sharing and the used book market -- publishers get zero $ for the used books which can be sold and re-sold for as long as that edition is in use. Publishers have to pay to develop, edit (which sometimes means ghostwrite), publish, distribute, and market their books and get their money back almost entirely in the first year a book is sold, after that more than half the copies sold are used.

If publishers could somehow remove the used book market (maybe after ebooks take off) new textbook prices would drop by at least a third. Possibly by half to 3/4 for electronic distribution of copy-protected ebooks.
 
i always get RAPED with college books :-(

then new editions come out and i can't sell back old ones GOD DAMN.
 
$180 for two books? That's a killer deal... you'll probably have a heart attack when you get to the more advanced courses that have $130-$150 books 😀
 
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