In the Loop...
By Chris Coates
News Editor

A few months back, the former anchors of WBBM-TV’s newscast—Walter Jacobson (now with WFLD-TV) and Bill Kurtis (now seen on A&E)—spoke with Bob Sirott about their reign at the top of Chicago’s news empire in the ’70s. In all, it was an enlightening, WTTW-quality broadcast, complete with a bit of name-dropping here and there. (Careful viewers even heard a mention of Columbia journalism faculty member and former WBBM-TV producer Rose Economou.) But the best bit of wisdom came at the end of the broadcast, when Jacobson confessed to one of his lifelong dreams: someday he wanted to open a bookstore.

I have similar aspirations, barring one difference: someday, I want to open a college bookstore. No wanton T-shirts or magnets, though. Just books. And unlike our bookstore, I’ll offer students a deal: I’ll only make an 800 percent profit.

The Columbia Bookstore, on the other hand, makes at least a 2,000 percent profit, by my public school calculations.

The mathematics is a bit vague: the bookstore, which is owned by an outside company, buys a text at a wholesale value. Let’s suppose such a book costs $1, for simplicity’s sake. The bookstore then ups the price to account for profit. At ten percent, that raises the cost to $1.10, which you pay.

A semester passes, and you sell back the text. Depending on various factors including availability (which the friendly folks at the bookstore remind me of each and every semester), the most you’ll receive back is half of its selling price—dropping the store’s net no more than 50 cents.

Next semester, the bookstore sells the books to someone else for slightly less than its original value, say 80 cents, a net of $1.30.

In other words, after one semester, the bookstore makes staggering profits of at least 75 percent. Used car salesmen would be envious of that amount.

This process repeats itself, with each pass upping the profit for the bookstore, or until a faculty member foolishly changes their classes’ text—which befuddles the whole process for the betterment of the bookstore.

The point is this: the bookstore always breaks even; they never lose money permanently. Instead, they simply lower exchange rates as each semester passes. Finally, when the text has a resale value of a plug nickel, a naïve student decides to just keep the damned thing. Or the store refuses to buy back the text under the “lack of demand” song-and-dance. It’s quite a bit of genius, in a Gennady Zyuganov sort of way.

Yet, in a school that charges a hodgepodge of fees, at least the bookstore could avoid trying to rake in huge profits. Or any profit, for that matter. That’s what the Columbia snow globes and tchotkes are for. Forget tuition and the inflated class fees.

This is further exacerbated by a interesting finding last week. Some schools let their students lease textbooks by the semester. Southern Illinois University in downstate Edwardsville has such a system, I’ve learned from an inside source. Yet, such a “book rental” program would be downright illogical at our tiny private school, or so Columbia might say.

What makes this slightly palatable is the fact that overcharging cash-strapped students is hardly out of the norm. This is partly because college students looking to buy a required text are a captive audience. Collegiate press editorials across the nation condemn their respective college bookstores for such assaults.

Some of the stores, 625 in North America in fact, are operated by Follett Higher Education Group. The privately held company also manages Columbia’s bookstore and doles out 20 million books a year across the continent, according to their website. In lay terms, it’s big business—enough to make Follett a Fortune 500 company in 1999.

So, who’s to blame? Certainly not Follett or, I’m chagrined to say, Columbia itself.

The culpability should lie in the hands of Columbia’s faculty who, more often than not, suggest buying a selected text when its use in the course is overrated. Why pay $63 for a used text when the professor rarely assigns a worthwhile reading assignment? Perhaps our faculty should consider offering texts online. After all, every professor I know went through this whole bookstore rigmarole in college too.

My new bookstore will offer just that: used textbooks, scanned to a floppy disk for consumption at home. That way, we can donate our used books to someone who really needs them: the public library.