University of Kentucky - Kentuckian Yearbook (Lexington, KY)

Page 21 text:

BOOKSTORES-17 we ook ing. ally ou- in irk- rs are 7 stu- alue. lester ov. 1 r Connit I scienct tbe tveel )ook ight two ;e 23 ing a at all. ?ut he based n past ) theii oil page 1- se of : use ?xist, if the third pur- 7.50. lived, Buy- ; may abso-

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By Mary Bolin I refuse to sell my textbooks back to Kennedy's or the University Bookstore each semester. I think we students are getting the short end of the deal when it comes to reselling books ' said senior Jay Peter. Bookstores are pictured as big rip-off joints, but we provide a legitimate function in book distribu- tion, said Joe Kennedy, whose store has sold thou- sands of textbooks to UK students since opening in 1950. We have operating expenses to cover. Mark- ups are needed to survive. Wiliam T. Eblen, manager of the University Book Store, explained its policy on book buying and selling. The publisher sets the new book price and we usually A Fair Exchange? Kennedy's Bookstore prepares for the first of the semester by setting up extra cash registers and having an excess of employees to help the multitude of students find their required texts. Photographs by Tom Moran purchase it at a 20 percent discount. So if the book sells for $10, we purchase it for $8. But freight charges have gone up over 200 percent in the past two years and now freight and operating costs average 23 percent of the publisher's list price. So we are taking a three percent loss on each book on the average. The value of a textbook varies on return because of several factors. If a text has been reordered for use the next semester, and sufficient stock does not exist, the student is paid one half of the original price of the book as a rule. The bookstore then has a one-third mark-up before resale. A book costing $10 new is pur- chased from the student for $5 and resold for $7.50. If a faculty order for the text has not been received, the value of the book depends on the Textbook Buy- ers Guide value listing. To the distributor, a book may be worth over half its new price or may have abso- lutely no value. Because almost half of the faculty book orders are received after the bookstores' deadline, many stu- dents must sell their books at the distributor's value. Eblen stated that book orders for spring semester were still arriving two months after the Nov. 1 deadline. We get book orders late and sometimes not at all We tried to contact one professor four times, but he never returned our calls, so we had to reorder based on past sales and the order size for the class in past years. Teachers like that do a real disservice to theii continued on page 7' I could see the cash register ringing it up in my mind” said Connit Widman after considering which books to buy. Widman, a soil scienct junior in agriculture education, bought over $5 0 worth of books the week before the spring semester started. 16-BOOKSTORES

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18-BOOKSTORES A Fair Writing that check for books is one of the painful” first-of-tbe- semester rituals that almost all students go through. Deborah Gordon, a communications junior from Lexington, prepares to rip-off her check for $92.89.