Textbook Retailer Says Students Save by Shopping Online
by Jim Brown
August 12, 2004
(AgapePress) - Many students heading back to school this fall are taking advantage of online alternatives to paying full retail prices for textbooks in their college bookstores.The typical college student today is spending $800 to $900 a year for textbooks. That can be a considerable portion of what a student spends to go to college. For that reason, many students have resorted to buying their books over the Internet. A recent survey found that more than half of U.S. college students are buying their textbooks online.
Brian Jacobs heads a company called Akademos, which runs TextbookX.com, an online retail college bookstore that allows students to purchase new and used books for their college courses at significant discounts. He says everybody wins with online textbook shopping.
Jacobs says a student typically gains three times more money by selling his or her textbooks to another student elsewhere in the country than the seller would get as a typical buyback price from a college bookstore. And at the same time, the textbook retail company president notes, "the student buyer is typically saving 50 percent, and we're taking a small commission in the process."
According to the CEO of Akademos, each year a lot of schools place an unfair financial burden on students by requiring them to buy unnecessary new editions of textbooks. "Many college educators and even some publishers recognize that the books don't need to be updated as much as they are," he says. "In fact, the edition changes and very often one finds little more than pagination changes -- changes in the numbering of pages -- when the old edition was perfectly fine."
Jacobs says the publishers do need to make money, but students need a break as well, and the online alternative is providing one. He notes that TextbookX.com sells hundreds of thousands of books per year.
