Opinion: Bookstore Takes Advantage of Students

Story by Broadside Opinion Editor Arthur Gailes. Photos by Photography Editor Courtney Erland.

The Mason bookstore actively rips off students every chance it gets. They mark up book prices obscenely high, buy books back at a rate much too low, and then rob us again when they sell them used. They use their position of convenience in the Johnson Center to steal money from students, especially the freshmen, every year.

This is the one time where we can really make a difference. For all we can complain about parking, we still have to park here. For all we complain about Internet service, it’s hard to just stop using it. We have the same problem with food, construction and most of the other problems on campus that bother us.

For the bookstore, however, there are cheaper alternatives that are more efficient and easier to use. And unlike the bookstore, we don’t have to guess when they’ll have a book in stock. Because college bookstores across the country are making a living ripping off students, the online community for textbooks has been growing, and there are a number of different sources where you can get textbooks.

PatriotWeb gives students their teachers’ e-mails ahead of time, so it’s very easy to just find out what books we need and get them online, having them ready before we even start classes. The bookstore often hides behind the veneer of convenience, but between the long lines, waits and questionable book supply, there’s rarely any real advantage. Also, the bookstore frequently doesn’t carry enough books for people registered in various classes. The advantage here is that the Internet rarely runs out of material.

Half.com is probably the best alternative online. It’s owned by eBay, and designed specifically for textbooks for students where they can see the used textbooks of students across the country. As the name implies, the service typically has books for half their selling price, as opposed to the bookstore, which typically only marks books down about 20 percent.

Because of the sensitive nature of textbooks, Half.com provides an extensive buyer protection program that reimburses buyers who make claims against a textbook. They reserve the right to remove any buyer or seller that cheats the system, which allows them to keep the community safe from people who would sell damaged books. Also, the sellers can, and mostly do, post pictures of the actual text to prove its condition. There are a great amount of Web sites that have different advantages and similar protections; all it takes is a quick search to find them.

The best thing about these online resources is that, by their nature, they solve one of the biggest problems with the bookstore: students can’t be taken advantage of by low buy-back prices and high selling prices for used books. Because sellers have to compete against each other, online sources keep the prices down for buyers and allow them to set their own values for textbooks. This ensures that students buy books at lower prices, and sell them at better rates.

Unfortunately, there are some times when we’ll be forced to use the bookstore. Some texts are exclusive to it (and they use that monopoly to do obscene price mark-ups), and for some hard-to-find books, it really is more convenient. But if we continue to buy and sell the majority of our books there, we give them permission to keep running their business inefficiently.

We need to put pressure on the bookstore and Mason to treat us with respect as customers, and more importantly, as students. The school needs to set up a policy to police the store to prevent unfair price mark-ups and make sure we aren’t taken advantage of when selling them back. Yes, this is something that all campus bookstores do. But as a supposedly progressive campus, it’s our responsibility and the school’s duty to keep the bookstore from using its position on campus to monopolize the market.