It’s the end of the semester, and you’re eager to sell back your textbooks for cash, hoping to end up with a wad of cash. How do you decide where to go? Are all places on campus essentially the same? Does it really matter where you decide to take your business when stores often give you just meager cents for your thick biology book?

In the case of international relations freshman Ashley Herzovi, it is all about convenience “because they’re not going to give me back a lot anyway,” she reasoned.

Herzovi goes to stations placed in dorms around campus by the Spartan Bookstore where students collect books on the store’s behalf and give their buyback price. She usually hits the one in South Case.

“[The stores] don’t advertise their buyback rates, so it’s not like I can shop around,” Herzovi said.

The reason the bookstores do not advertise buyback prices is because the system upon which buyback prices are decided is not something that can be announced on a poster outside the store. “50% on all buybacks!” is not something any bookstore can even come close to promising.

Mike Wylie, assistant manager of the Student Bookstore on Grand River, even admits that his popular store is not able to provide the best prices around.

“The first factor is whether a book will be used for the upcoming semester,” Wylie explained. “If it is being used, than the law of supply and demand comes into play. If a book is not being used for the upcoming semester there is a wholesale price set by companies that buy and sell books to other bookstores. There are multiple companies that do this and their prices will vary.”

The manager of the Spartan Bookstore, Robbin Manor, has a similar system. 

“If we need 150 copies of a title to sell, the first 150 students that sell their books get 50 percent of the new price,” she said.  “Once the store has the number they need they continue to buy books at the Buyer’s Guide price. This is the price a used book wholesaler will pay the store for the books that the store does not need for the shelf. So if a book retails new at $100 and we need 150 copies to sell for the next semester, the first 150 students will be paid $50 for the book.” 

So why do students find themselves sometimes getting as little as $0.75 as a buyback price? 

“Every student selling their book after that gets the Buyer's Guide price for that book,” Manor said. “Sometimes there is no value at all for these.” 

The Student Bookstore will give students up to only a dollar for these unwanted books.

As much as students may want to blame the bookstores themselves for sometimes unfair buyback prices, in reality, it turns out to be the bookstores’ wholesalers who are the sticklers on prices, which is the reason students walk away with less than satisfactory sellback results.

“The price is determined by the used book wholesaler, not the store,” Manor said.

And what about those books that the stores will not accept at all?

“Out of seven books, [the store] only took two because they said the others were out of date, not worth anything, or they had a surplus of them,” said Dylan Gersh, an advertising freshman.

The Student Bookstore does not have a severely set policy on which books can be sold back.

“It would be very hard to write a policy that would fit all situations,” Wylie said. 

Robbin Manor supplied a more detailed answer for her policy at the Spartan Bookstore. 

“We can buy back any book that we need for our shelves or any that can be sold to a used book wholesaler,” she said. “Sometimes we even pay $1 for books not on the list and then donate them to third world countries.”

Jennifer Lada, a hospitality business freshman, went to the Student Bookstore to sell back her books last semester. 

“I didn’t know of alternative places to go,” she said. 

She said she will never go there again because she was ultimately unsatisfied with the prices she received. 

“I pay way more for used books than what the buyback price gives me,” she said.

Lada recently stumbled upon a new alternative to selling back books. It is a website called Dorm Books, which is a student-run business that supplies higher-than-usual buyback prices and provides a service for free dorm-room and apartment pick-up. As of right now, Dorm Books is only for students majoring in business, but in Spring 2010 the service will be opening up to all majors.

And that is not the only alternative. Jolene Collins, a political science freshman, simply gave up on selling her books back to the bookstores because she was fed up with the prices she was receiving. 

“I sold most of my books on Amazon because I thought it was ridiculous,” she said in reference to the Student Bookstore’s buyback prices where she had first tried to sell her books.

What To Do:
As unsatisfying as the buyback prices for textbooks tend to be for students, the bookstores themselves are not the ones to blame. Rather, the blame lies with the system under which the bookstores are forced to set their prices through used book wholesalers above them. The big question remains of whether or not there is a way around these sometimes unfair sellback prices, and it turns out there is hope. Try selling your books on eBay or Amazon for a better price, simply refrain from buying the newest edition of a textbook to get a cheaper price for essentially the same information, or try out the Dorm Books website for a new alternative in trying to scrounge up the most money you can for your unwanted textbooks.

If, however, you end up selling back your textbooks to the bookstores, the best advice is to do it early before everyone else. That is how you will end up getting the very best price possible.