Book Buy-Back
The first item listed in a book directed towards personal finance should be:
DON’T BUY BOOKS FOR COLLEGE. EVER.
These bastardly creations can cost upwards of $400 or even $500 in introductory courses. Once you’re in med school you may as well wish all of your hard-earned monies good-bye!
Or at least thank your parents for shielding you from debilitating debt.
My friends Steven and Sunny, who live conveniently across the hall (roughly 6.5 feet), and I decided to sell our first semester books back to the campus bookstore. We packed our backpacks with between 10 and 25lbs of books each and headed to the shop to find our new books and peddle our old ones for what we assumed would be quite a bit of money.
Given the starting costs of the books (between $60 and $160 for me), I figured I’d make enough to pay for half or at least one of my books. My friend Sunny logically thought the same.
However, as we discussed prices with the Buy-Back ladies, it became immediately clear that we were going to get next to nothing for books we had payed a hell of a lot to read. My Writing 1 book sold back for a hefty $15 (comparitively it cost about $70, if memory serves me), and 2 of my other books sold until I reached $45 in total sales. However, I was required to purchase 7 books for my courses last semester.
What happened to the other 4 books?
Well, to earn extra money, and perhaps to further burden students with debt, publishers and authors come out with new “editions” of books every so often. These new editions often fix typos or address formatting concerns, but generally contain the same information +- a foreword and a rearranging of the chapters or organization of the material. This creates problems for students because Edition 7 of a Western Civilization book may contain just about all the same information as Edition 6, but the pages will be in a slightly different order. When a professor declares Edition 7 to be the required book for coursework, a student who had purchased Edition 6 may read the wrong material since the pages have been switched around.
And so, we college kids, living on 36 cent ramen packs and Easy-Mac bowls, shell out additional cash to avoid the problem of not knowing where the hell the information we were assigned to read has gone. This would not be such a large problem if the books we purchased were able to be sold directly back…
HOWEVER, because of the new editions coming out, apparently on schedule with semester changes (BASTAAAAAAARDS!), books are rarely able to be sold back. I was lucky to have three of my books taken off my hands, but the value of my other books dropped 100% of their value a few weeks before the courses were over.
This is aggravating, to say the least. But my friend Sunny had it worse. All of his books had new editions released within the previous two weeks. If that weren’t enough, the Business school books he had to purchase were among the most expensive in the store!
Often people say that cars have the fastest depreciating value of all. However, the resale value of our books went from roughly 60% to “wholesale” value, which came out to be about 6% of the actual value of the book within a few weeks.
WHAT. THE HELL.
