I continue to be astonished by how efficient the used textbook market has become. This week, at the end of the spring quarter at Ohio State University, a drive-thru textbook buy-back service popped up on the site of a long-closed gas station. It is a tent on a parking lot that truly does allow someone to drive through to drop off books (see the third image down). The operation is run by Budgetext, a national textbook wholesaler from Fayetteville, AR. I spoke with company representative Jerry Mohr about the service.
Images here link to larger versions in Flickr
Budgetext is partnered with Student Book Exchange (SBX) to bring this first-in-Columbus service to Ohio State. Budgetext services the textbook wholesaling needs of SBX. Since Budgetex has the list of textbooks through SBX that are needed for the next school term, it can more intelligently buy back the books that will be needed. Jerry said that most of the books bought back through the drive thru service will stay in the area, with the remainder wholesaled through their national network.
It is hard to beat the convenience. One literally drives up, hands the books over, and gets the cash back (or the book back if it is not needed by Budgetext). On a day like today in Columbus — with the downpour this morning and this afternoon — that process certainly seems to beat lugging the books to a desk inside a bookstore.
Although this is the first drive-through in central Ohio, it is not the first such setup in the state. A drive-through program was set up at Owens Community College in northwest Ohio two years ago. Jerry told me that in its first 4 1/2 days of operation, 500 cars came through. The following term 1,500 cars came through. All kinds of people come through — parents with kids, handicapped individuals, even multiple students in one car. Jerry said that one car last year had three students: one each from Owens Community College, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. It is still too early to tell how well the service will do in this location.
The impact of these improved efficiencies in the used textbook market makes the textbook ecosystem even more complicated. It is capitalism at its finest, but I’m not sure this present trajectory is sustainable.
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5 Comments
Long Beach State in California has been doing this for years.
Thanks, bookguy. Perhaps this is something new to the midwest. Or perhaps just to central Ohio. (The manager of the operation did mention the now two-year-old setup in northeast Ohio.)
Odd comment. You cannot have a book market without a used book market. To say that new books would cost less if there were no used books is one of those impossible scenarios that does not exist in the real world. The only way it could exist is if all colleges bought new books for all of their students–and let the students keep the books. What school has budget for that?
We cannot have a book market without a used book market? Are you sure you don’t have the wrong way around: we can’t have a used book market without a (first sale) book market. This is the copyright “first sale doctrine” — your right to dispose of copyrighted material you legally buy.
To say that new books would cost less if more of them were sold is a matter of economics. Textbook (and most other physical goods) cost some large, fixed amount to produce the first copy, and then much lesser amounts to produce subsequent copies. A publisher’s ability to sell more subsequent copies spreads the fixed costs of the first copy over more units, lowering the per-unit costs of all copies.
You miss the point, of course you can’t have a used market without an original manufacturer and I’m very familiar with the first sale doctrine, that’s how I’ve made my living for 19 years.
I’m saying that unless the university buys all new books and gives them to students, that it is impossible not to have a used book market. If a bookstore did not sell used, then students would start co-ops(and properly manage them), greek organizations would get serious about their text libraries, and of course you have the internet.
Therefore, to say that used books drive up the cost of new books is merely academic and distracting to the real conversion of finding methods for lowering textbook costs.
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