The Textbook Story

Students may be surprised to learn that even after they spend
hundreds of dollars on class reading material, the Associated
Students of UCLA is not profiting off textbooks ““ nor are
they dictating the prices.

According to UCLA Store retail director Keith Schoen, the
publisher sets the cost and ASUCLA adheres to the list price.

“When the publisher comes out with a new edition, the
prices increase 99 percent of the time,” Schoen said.

Books generally stay for 2-3 years before getting revised, said
Anne Collum, ASUCLA textbook buyer.

Schoen added that the sale of all textbooks, APS course readers
and lecture notes is budgeted at $16.5 million this year.

On an annual basis, ASUCLA makes $2.5 million in revenue from
textbooks ““ but that is without deducting allocated expenses,
which includes insurance, utilities, rent and maintenance.

Any money made after expenses goes toward the student union and
programming bodies such as the Undergraduate Students Association
Council and the Graduate Students Association.

In order to help students find cheaper books, ASUCLA has a
buyback program for students to sell back their old textbooks for
up to 50 percent of the current price, Collum said. Last year,
students saved $1.3 million from the buyback program, but not all
books were bought back at half of the current price.

And sometimes students do not get this return value.

Third-year biology student Celia Christianson said she stopped
using the buyback program after her freshman year.

“I’d rather own the book than get 20 percent of what
I bought for it,” she said.

The pricing, though, is affected by the professor’s choice
in books for each quarter.

“We can’t really buy back books that aren’t
adopted (by the professor),” Collum said.

Instructors sometimes notify ASUCLA late regarding what books
they need, or they don’t adopt a book until after the buyback
period, which affects pricing, she said.

According to Peter Nonacs, a professor in organismic biology,
ecology and evolution, textbooks need to be changed
consistently.

OBEE professors would rather have several books that are
pertinent to the course instead of having one book for everything,
he added.

“Some textbooks will cover materials for things for Life
Science 1 and then have a lot of errors in it for LS2,”
Nonacs said.

Compared to books from a regular book store like Borders,
textbook prices are generally higher.

Cliff Ewert, vice president of campus relations of Follet
Corporation, UCLA’s prime book supplier, explained that
textbooks are printed on better paper, have better binding, and
contain more full-colored pictures than other books.

Also, most textbooks are produced in relatively low quantities
““ 15,000 to 20,000 ““ which isn’t high, Ewert
said.

But from school to school, the prices remain about the same, at
standard industry pricing.

Christianson, who doesn’t consider the buyback system to
be very effective in saving money, still likes buying her books at
the store ““ mainly because of the one-stop shopping
arrangement in Ackerman.

“I never buy textbooks anywhere else because I’m too
lazy to go anywhere else,” she said.

Other students go beyond hunting for cheaper textbooks by trying
to find ways to avoid paying for them altogether.

Michael Gordon, a fifth-year political science student,
downloads required court cases and gets the rest of his books from
the campus libraries.

“The price doesn’t bug me as much, since the price
is zero for me,” said Gordon.

Despite the high cost of books, Schoen said ASUCLA still tries
to maintain reasonable prices.

“We try to keep the prices competitive. Sometimes we
can’t be as low as Wal-Mart or the other cheap books,”
Schoen said.