[nabs-l] How College Bookstores are Killing College Bookstores

[Deb Mendelsohn]

How College Bookstores are Killing College Bookstores

   - Mark Athitakis<http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106376/decline-of-college-bookstores-textbooks-online-print#>
   - August 21, 2012 | 4:46 pm
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As a University of Chicago undergrad in the early ’90s, I had a
thrice-yearly ritual. Head to the Seminary Co-op
Bookstore<https://gw.tnr.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.semcoop.com/>,
a homely but well-stocked basement-level shop with exposed pipes, narrow
aisles, and a mazelike arrangement of shelves. Squeeze into the warren in
back designated for assigned texts and stock up on Barthes, Foucault,
Marx-Engels, etc. After shouldering through the scrum of classmates
performing the same task, take a moment to contemplate the shelves of
fiction set quietly apart from the fray. Make a mental list of what to pick
up cheap later at one of Hyde Park’s many used bookstores; the required
texts wrecked my book budget.

The typical student bookstore experience—get in, get out, contemplate the
months of ramen to come—has never been a great way to cultivate a love of
books. It’s never about the literary joys of serendipitous discovery; it’s
about the bureaucratic routine of required reading. Even before the
thrice-annual draining of my wallet, the college bookstore was tough to
romanticize.

But today, campus bookstores’ long-term survival depends on abandoning
literary pretense altogether. According to the National Association of
College Stores<https://gw.tnr.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nacs.org/>,
which represents approximately 3,000 campus retailers, course materials
account for a smaller and smaller proportion of total bookstore sales,
ticking down from 57 percent in 2009 to 56 percent in 2010, to 54 percent
last year. At the University of Tennessee, textbooks account for just 36
percent of sales according to director David Kent, who anticipates the
figure will be between 20 and 25 percent in a couple of years. “And that’s
right where we want to be,” he says. “We don’t want to be out of that
business, but we want to be diversified enough in our offerings that we’re
not so dependent on one particular category.”

What happened? Not e-textbooks, at least not yet. American universities are
experimenting more with them: A much-discussed pilot program led by
publisher McGraw-Hill
launched<http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/pilot-e-textbooks/>
at
five universities earlier this year, and cable-TV company Discovery recently
announced<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/technology/discovery-invests-in-digital-textbooks-in-hopes-of-growth.html?_r=1%26ref=textbooks>
its
own e-textbook plan for the K-12 set. However, the old-fashioned print
textbook still accounts
for<http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/story/2012-08-13/etextbooks/57039872/1>
the
overwhelming majority of sales. What’s different now is students’ ability
to sidestep the bookstore to acquire them. The Higher Education Opportunity
Act, passed by Congress in 2008,
required<http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/registrar/faculty/heoa>
schools
to provide texts’ ISBN numbers in course listings, facilitating robust
comparison shopping—and more online buying. Stores responded by supporting
more affordable textbook rentals, but with an increasing number of websites
offering the same service (Amazon stepped
into<http://mashable.com/2012/08/07/amazon-textbook-rental/> the
physical-textbook rental business earlier this month), that’s trading one
margin-wrecking hypercompetitive market for another.

“The traditional main source of revenue has leveled out, and we realize
that in the future it will decline,” says NACS spokesperson Charlie
Schmidt.Indeed, *Defining the College Store of 2015*, a 2010 white paper by
the NACS Foundation, the organization’s research arm, exhorts members to
expand into new markets fast. “Shift from being a book store to a campus
store in the broadest sense of the phrase,” one boldfaced passage reads.

To talk with Schmidt and NACS Foundation head Vicki Morris-Benion about the
future of college bookstores is to talk about pretty much everything
besides books: The college store of 2015 is one part Target, one part
ESPNU, one ever-shrinking part course materials: There are the requisite
team-branded T-shirts, notebooks, and shot glasses, but also computer
repair, dry cleaning, grab-and-go sushi, pop-up stores, Wii competitions,
poetry slams, train tickets. The value of the bookstore in the next few
years is being reduced to its simplest definition: it’s the place with a
cash register. “Because we’re the gathering place, we also are the place
that is best equipped to take money and collect sales tax,” Morris-Benion
says.

It’s hard to bemoan students pursuing a better deal. After all, not every
book you buy in college needs to become a beloved token of wisdom and
knowledge; the genetics textbook shoring up a shelf in my father’s study
700 miles away from me stands in dusty testament to that. But the culture
of cheaper textbook rentals does have consequences; embedded in it is the
notion of books as a short-term disposable commodity. Mark Sample, an associate
professor <http://www.samplereality.com/about/> of English at George Mason
University, is mindful of costs, and he recommends that his students go to
Amazon first for books—he estimates that for one upcoming class students
will save $35 over the campus store. But he’s no fan of leases. “As
somebody who reads and loves books, I hate the idea that students will just
be renting the book,” he says. “I worry that students won’t connect as much
with a book they know they have to return.”

Bridging this gap—making texts affordable as well as meaningful—seems
increasingly unlikely in the long run. Stores are “pinned between the
incredibly high prices that publishers set for their products, and
students, quite understandably, desiring the best deal that they can,” says
Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of communications for the Modern
Language Association. So we’ll likely see more of what the University of
Tennessee bookstore is doing: In the next two years, Kent says, it will
open four stores stuffed with headphones and team merchandise and iPads,
and has plans to expand the team shops outside of Knoxville. Go Vols!

The college bookstore, in other words, is asphyxiating the college
bookstore. Worse, it’s helpless to avoid doing so. The ideas bubbling under
as possible saviors—e-textbooks, open textbooks—aren’t yet ready as
workable substitutes. In the meantime, even the cursory experience of
browsing and discovery I had is eroding in the face of rentals and
sell-backs. Discovery, we have to trust, is the province of the classroom.

*Mark Athitakis is a writer and editor in Washington, DC. He blogs at *
markathitakis.com*.*



-- 
*Deb's Cell:  520-225-8244*