Sophomore Kevin Bohne may have bought all of his textbooks at the Loras College Bookstore this semester, but he’s not exactly happy about it.
“(The prices) are too damn high,” Bohne said. “Just about everyone will tell you that.”Bohne said he spent around $300 on this semester’s book load, and he’s likely on the low end of the spectrum.
Bohne certainly isn’t alone in his complaint. The cost of required textbooks is an issue that resonates with all students at the start of a new semester and has pushed some students, such as first-year Kirsten Glover, to take their money elsewhere. “It doesn’t make sense financially to buy them here,” Glover said. Glover said she made her purchases online through Amazon.com, paying $240 for a load of books that would have cost her close to $500 in the Loras Bookstore. Despite her savings online, Glover felt that she would be willing to buy books in a physical location if prices were somewhat more reasonable.
“You’re never going to find the lowest price at your school,” Glover said, “but the convenience of finding them all in one place would be nice if there wasn’t much of a difference in price.”
Renee Menne, the manager of the Loras Bookstore, said that convenience is one of the many reasons that some students continue to purchase their books at the bookstore each year, regardless of pricing. “If you get it from us, you know you have the right edition, you have all the right stuff,” Menne said.
Menne said that the Bookstore feels the pressure to compete with Internet bookstores, but logistics issues such as overhead fees make a price change below the standard pricing markup for area colleges highly unlikely.
This is the first year that Loras has placed its required textbooks’ ISBN numbers on its website. This relatively subtle change has helped to bring competition between the on-campus store and the Internet to the forefront. However, Menne said that the posting of ISBN numbers has yet to have an effect on Bookstore revenue as of yet.
“It appears that it’s about the same,” Menne said, “Usually we have to go about 2 weeks into school to guess correctly.”
The sustained revenues are likely due to experiences like the one junior Devin Kass had during his first semester on campus. Kass, a transfer student from Kirkwood Community College, took advantage of the bookstore’s online services and had no trouble picking up all of his books on site when he needed them. “I didn’t really do much but tell them my name,” Kass said. “They had all my books organized.”
The convenience and security inherent in a physical site ensures that even disenfranchised students like Bohne will likely find themselves in the bookstore at the start of each semester. “You give a person the option: come here and have the books tomorrow, or wait for the books (online),” Bohne said.
Students may not have closure on the issue of pricing anytime soon, but with the continued growth of internet alternatives at least they’ll have plenty of options after they pick up their booklists each semester.
