This is the official thread for complaining about your college/university's textbooks, and/or bookstore.

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Grrr.... My professor for my oceanography class wrote the textbook, AND there is a CD-ROM with it, which means that I won't be able to return it. Therefore, I must spend $120 for a new one. AND $20 for the answer book!

Gah!

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You have a grandstand seat to one of the greatest on most momentous occasions in the history of science

Weird. What's that return policy?

The bookstore at my school won't accept any returns with open CDs (or floppy discs -- yeah, I had a text last year that came with a floppy). Period.

HOWEVER, DH, you might want to consider looking around for a sold-by-students listing on campus somewhere. You could put up a wanted ad, or something.

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"The plan does not involve mayonaise."
"... I knew there was a catch."

You can't take the sky from me.

That's actually a pretty common bookstore policy. My Local Barnes and Nobles has that policy. IIRC Amazon has that policy too.

the community college I attended had posters up explaining how textbook costs broke down, basically to point out that it wasn't there fault books were so expensive. the four-year I attended to finish out my degree had a lot of idiot students driving up prices for the rest of us by "rebelling against the Man" and stealing their books to protest the high cost of books. and, yes, we all wanted to slap them with textbooks, too.

fortunately, I ended up having a neighbor in the same class as I (one 16-credit class a quarter was the norm at that school), so I didn't have to buy all my textbooks the one year I was in a real class at that school.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

This is the first reply from a BABBler who works in a University Bookshop.

• We're not a lending library, so don't try and get a refund for your books after your course has finished / you dropped out. Ever heard of the concept of a professional library of your own?
  
  We don't set the texts. We don't even set the prices. I'm sorry your books are expensive. You're a penniless student, just like the person behind you who isn't complaining at me. What do you want me to do about it?
  
  No, I don't know what books you need. Especially if you can't even tell me what subjects you're enrolled in. That's what a booklist is for.
  
  I'm sure your lecturer told you the books would be here. Unfortunately, they didn't tell us what the books were, or how many students they had. So they're not.
  
  If you'd bought your books at the start of semester as you were meant to, you wouldn't be panicking at the end of semester because we're out of them and it'll take a week or two to get them in.
  
  If you do want to sell your second-hand books, go ahead. But don't put your flyers up around the bookshop counter. That's just rude.

Sorry if this seems a bit grouchy. I'm just fed up with being whinged at all day by students who seem to regard our policies as a personal insult. I was a student once, too. I know it's hard...

But we do our best, and most students understand that. The few who don't, however....

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"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." - Isaac Asimov

One problem is that booksellers have agreements with schools and then the dean probably sets policy that makes the teachers assign books from the bookstore. I took a few classes where the teacher basically told us that he wished he didn't have to assign "real" books, since most of the subject matter was public domain...

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

And it gets stranger. I once needed a third-year Russian text, and our campus bookstore would not order it (although an off-campus bookstore would). There is a legal tug-of-war in this state (at least) which has set in place a requirement that university bookstores make available to any other local bookstores the textbook lists (and one of these has tried a bit of electronic subterfuge directed at faculty to try to catch violations.

And the package deals, in which the bookstore ilwl pull together someone's textbooks, can go awry. I just heard from a stident who had a $300 book bill for intro astronomy. It seems that some sections, taught by different professors, use different books - and someone had pulled out a copy of every text used by any professor in any section...

I've found that using Amazon.com can get used and new books for some classes cheaper than the bookstore.
I also plan to sell my old textbooks there, whenever I get around to it... ops:

the best bookstore in Olympia tends to have the textbooks for The Evergreen State College and some classes at South Puget Sound Community College--at 10% off the cover price, yet. of course, they don't have many copies, and it's first come, first served. it was also, oddly, the only place I could get the language text for my Gaelic class a few years ago.

however, the system works primarily because very few Evergreen classes use traditional textbooks. that Gaelic text, for example, was just a teach-yourself-Gaelic book-and-tape system. further, they don't buy a lot of books back at the end of the quarter, because they only need a couple of copies of most books except when it's being used as a textbook, so the bookstore buy-back probably ends up buying a lot of books from Orca, instead of bought at their own store. (but hey, they don't care--it's all part of a system anyway.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I didn't buy one book from the bookstore this year. Why would you when they're consistantly at least twenty dollars cheaper online brand new? Heck I got a brand new copy of my circuits book for $25 that was $100 at the bookstore! :-?
But then, it always helps to have a few students in your major the year ahead of you who always say "hey wanna buy these books off of me?" 8)

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Yes, I have a life. It's quite different from yours.

nuff said. you guys and you're weird fight song about the equally weird "clam" for a mascot <shudder>

of courwe, i just paid $125 plus tax for a 1st semester device physics book. i have one from 1989, the first time i took the class, but apparently things have changed... grrr. fortunately, my company actually pays for my books, too, in the reimbursement program. phew!

taks

one of my roommates in college did that, waited until the last month of the course to get the textbook. Then after the semester finished and he got a 'C-' he would tell everyone how tough the course was. :roll:

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

yep. that's us. however, our weird hippy origins do contribute quite a lot to such things as bookstore policy. the faculty still manages to remember that college students are poor, and some classes can be got by on nothing but Dover Books.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Of course, those of us with UCSC degrees take second place to none in memorable mascots. Clams, nothing - slime 'em, slugs!

This will always be a problem and probably still will. When I went to college it was not unusual to have a $60 book ($141 in today's money) my average textbook was around $40. The more specific the class, the more expensive it was. I had a physics class called 7 ideas that shook the universe(or something like that). The text was a wimpy little spiral bound guy that was just as expensive as my other books. I would assume not many people are taking oceanography.
Calc was the most upsetting, it was one of those expensive books, and in the middle of the 3 semesters they changed the edition (grrr).

When you say return, do you mean sell-back? We never had returns, but the bookstores would buy (at about 50% off) used books to resell (at around 25% off) if they thought they would still be used. I knew lots of people who would specifically by used books because someone already did the highlighting. I always wondered if you could trust the previous person to highlight the right stuff.

I don't like textbooks because they are boring.

I don't like Bookstores because the employees get angry when you rock out there.

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"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

ha! ha, I say! UCSC rips off all its funky weirdness from Evergreen; well-known fact! we were Geoducks before they were Banana Slugs. neener neener neener!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"