1: Books are expensive.
When you go to college, you learn firsthand that textbooks are expensive. Insanely expensive. So expensive that you assume there must be literal gold dust in the ink and diamonds threaded into the paper.
However, nothing prepares you for working alongside these expensive textbooks every day. At first, there’s something overwhelming about working with piles of books worth more than your total college tuition. I imagine it’s a bit like working at a grocery store. But all the shelves are stocked with Bengal tigers piled on top of one another. There’s a certain level of fear, respect, and awe. Eventually though, seeing those triple digit prices every day can get desensitizing. That is until you have to sell them to someone.
2: The bookstore is where students’ wallets go to die
I’ll never know what it’s like to lead a blue-ribbon lamb to the shed behind the barn. But I imagine it’s a bit like guiding a new student through rows of textbooks, watching the light in their eyes die with every stack of paper you hand them.
Textbooks are expensive, but someone has to buy them, and someone has to sell them. It’s not the cleanest job in the world, and luckily no one has ever blamed me for the ruin I’ve secondhandedly wrought on their finances, but working in a college bookstore was never for the faint of heart. The false sense of security you build surrounded by thousands of dollars of texts melts away as you pass those texts onto someone who actually has to pay for them.
But hey, at least I’m not the one checking them out. I’m not that brave.
3: Do not wait
There is some relief from the fate described above. Buy your books early. Have you bought your books for the next semester? If not, I sincerely suggest you start looking now. Only working through one semester’s worth of text stocking has shown me that your only escape from expensive textbooks (a.k.a. used books) slips away within a few days of classes.
If you want to survive the deluge of expenses that comes with buying or even renting from your college bookstore, you have to get on the ark before the door closes. Everything after that is just a lot of rain, panic, and crying. Lots of crying.
Getting your textbooks early lets you choose your poison and mitigate the damage your budget takes each semester. If you can buy early, do it.
4: People always wait
Unfortunately, very few people buy early. I’ve helped people find their textbooks from the first day of class through the midpoint of the semester. My immediate reaction to these customers was usually in internal cringe.
“How could they be so irresponsible?”
I finally got my answer only a few weeks ago. I felt bad for how obvious it was.
Money.
Many people, myself included, might be tempted to throw late shoppers under the bus as bad students and reckless consumers. In my own life, however, I’ve realized that this opinion is highly influenced by my privilege as a rather well-off college student. I’ve never had to choose between a weekly meal and a required English text. I’ve never had to weigh the cost between a week of gas and a psychology lab book. Textbooks are a given, not a question of “if” or “how.” Yet, many of my peers face these choices, and understandably they make shortcuts where they can.
Sometimes that even means waiting till the last moment to sacrifice whatever money they can for their midterm exam. Even if that means skipping lunch.
5: Is there a better way?
Couldn’t we do this a different way?
Working in a college bookstore, witnessing the price of knowledge, and its weight on people my own age, make me wonder if there is something wrong with the way this all works.
Should the access to knowledge be intrinsically tied to affording lavishly priced texts? Should anyone have to skip lunch just to meet a basic requirement of higher education? As the United States continues to consider reforming the way we handle university pricing, I have to wonder what will happen to the texts. Should the same principles which push us to make higher education feasible for everyone similarly pressure us to rethink how a key part of that education is handled?
Textbooks are an underlying and powerful part of education. They carry the burden of work required to learn and grow as an individual. If we want to make that growth more readily available, along with the benefits which follow, we may need to reevaluate this single gear within the larger mechanism.
In the meantime, I’ll keep myself busy ordering my books for next semester.
