Multimedia Reporting (Adler-Noland)

Jakub Lichwa, Ropczyce, Poland, Junior, said he’s tired of paying high prices for textbooks. Before the start of the spring 2007 semester, he decided to do something about it. Lichwa started a group on the Web site facebook.com to give fellow KU students a place to buy, sell, and trade textbooks.

But Jakub isn’t the only one with affordable textbooks ideas. A local business owner recently opened a store designed to give better values for books, and the president of the Students’ Rights coalition is pushing for a program that would change the way students get their books.

After buying costly textbooks for his college-aged son, Dan Keating decided to go into the textbook business. He and his wife, Denise Keating, opened Beat the Bookstore on May 7, just in time for the spring textbook buy-back season. The store is on the outskirts of campus, next door to Yello Sub. Beat the Bookstore will try to live up to its name by lowering its cost of goods sold, and by keeping its books in the store instead of selling to wholesalers. Dan Keating said that bookstores tend to take advantage of students because they know that textbooks are a necessity.

“Rather than treating you as a captured market, you need to be treated with respect,” Dan Keating said.

Textbook rental may be a way to get around going to bookstores altogether. Johnathan Wilson, who recently ran for student body president as the leader of Students’ Rights, included a textbook rental program as one of his key platform issues. Wilson said that the proposed program would run through the Kansas Union and would involve students paying one flat fee and renting textbooks for one semester. He said that he would continue to push the program through the fall and that the issue would be on his platform again when he runs for student body president next spring.

“I feel that it's my duty to take initiative and cause positive change in the way textbooks are purchased at KU, to make them more affordable to students so they can spend the money elsewhere,” Wilson said.

As in Lichwa’s case, the Internet can be a helpful tool in avoiding bookstores. His group, entitled “Buy textbooks over the Facebook :),” now has more than 100 members. Lichwa said that he personally has purchased three books through the group, saving him about $110.

“The original purpose of the group was of course to get a chance to buy textbooks cheaper, without any intermediaries like bookstores or even Amazon or eBay, so we could also avoid huge commissions on sales. I was just sick of paying $150 for a book that could not be resold next semester anyway, because the new edition was just coming up on the market,” Lichwa said.

The bookstore may not be the source of the problem, however. Bill Madl, textbook manager at the Jayhawk Bookstore, said that book publishers are responsible for rising costs. He said that publisher representatives try to convince professors to use newer and more expensive editions of textbooks instead of staying with the previous year’s book. Madl tries to help keep prices low by educating professors on their textbook options. He said professors often think that older books will not be as easy to find as newer editions, which is usually not the case.

“If a publisher had its way, there would be no buy-back. They want to sell new product every year,” Madl said.

But publishers do have ways to lower textbook prices. David Hakensen, the vice president of public relations at Pearson Education, said that Pearson has expanded the number of affordable alternative they offer customers. He said the company makes split editions, loose-leaf editions, and black-and-white editions that are all less expensive than the normal books.

“We empathize with students and parents about the cost of college. College tuition and related costs are a big investment. We believe with some of the low-cost options we offer that we are helping to offer students alternatives for their learning materials,” Hakensen said.

Pearson also offers more than 1,000 different textbooks electronically. Some KU professors have begun to use electronic textbooks for their classes. Students buy the e-books in CD form, and read them on their computers. Madl said that the e-books would become more popular in the future as people become more comfortable with computer technology. E-books generally cost about half as much as their paper counterparts. Jeff Dressel, graduate teaching assistant in psychology, uses e-books in his two psychology 104 classes.

“I was trying to keep cost down for students, and the material in the electronic books is the same,” Dressel said.

These alternative ideas could significantly benefit students, whose frustration with buying textbooks is mounting.

“I think it’s pretty ridiculous, honestly, because it’s just a book, and a lot of times you can’t sell them because they get a new edition. That’s crap,” said Charity Lempenau, McCune, Junior.