Look at the shelves of the Bookstore and you can find a range of titles from biology textbooks costing nearly $300 before taxes to tiny pamphlets costing $4. However, many of the texts (especially ones with a larger size) can be found online for substantially less cost, using only a simple Google search and waiting a few days for them to arrive.
I looked at all of the books currently sold out at the Bookstore, to ensure students were actually purchasing the books, and found some interesting data! The average price of a new book at the Bookstore was one hundred and fifty-six dollars and nine cents. Those same books? One hundred and thirty-two dollars online. Online retailers often offered such better deals on new textbooks that they still were more affordable than the Bookstore’s used copies.
Now, there are some good offers at the bookstore. Geology textbooks such as “Key Concepts in Geomorphology” are a whopping thirty-six dollars more expensive online than in the Bookstore. If you are spending the shocking three hundred dollars on a textbook like that, I recommend saving ten percent at the bookstore.
The biggest savings could be found for Psychology students taking Child Development and Learning taught by Kokorudz. At the Bookstore, this text is priced at $249.75 new or $187.50 used, but the same edition is available for more than $100 dollars less on Amazon at $133.48.
The Bookstore does offer competitive pricing on digital rentals. If I found a discrepancy in pricing, it was only a few dollars, and was usually cheaper if you were to purchase your copy from the Bookstore.
What does this mean for students? Look up the book that you are buying! If you do not need your textbook until later, plan ahead to save hundreds of dollars. Consider buying some of them online. I wish that I could say that these dollars at the Bookstore go to paying for good jobs for students, but they are not unionized and are paid horribly. When students are already financially strained, and BU’s Bookstore does little for students other than occasionally giving a slight discount on books, what is it really good for? Currently, the only alternatives are online retailers like Amazon, but in the future we could hope for BUSU to advocate for our tuition money to go towards making copies of our textbooks available in the library. Or, BUSU could purchase the books themselves, and have them conveniently placed next to a scanning machine for students to access.
There can be more affordable ways for students to access our textbooks, and unless the Bookstore pays their employees real wages or makes their prices better, I do not plan to stop letting you know.