Students experience it time after time. They pay their bills and budget their expenses to return to school. Many even set aside a party fund for the quarter. But they’ve forgotten one thing: textbooks.
For first quarter student Laina Gaoteote, “the bookstore is so expensive. It’s crazy.” Gaoteote is not alone with this opinion.
Statistics from a La Voz survey of 100 students reveal that 75 of them feel that the bookstore is expensive, but that 76 percent do not seek alternatives such as exchanging books with friends, buying books online, or purchasing them from other bookstores.
Statistically speaking, La Voz conducted the survey non-randomly, as students polled were readily available in the campus center and the main quad.
For years, students have complained about the prices of textbooks. De Anza College Bookstore director, Jim Ladd, said that the bookstore employees are “sick and tired” of hearing students complain about the high prices. He said, “We try our best to lower the prices of books … the school needs to make a profit.”
According to Ladd, the bookstore gives $150,000 to the college. He said that the Open Media Lab, for example, receives a third of its money for computers from the bookstore.
Bookstore floor coordinator Deb Sack says that when it comes to the actual price of the book, it is based on the publisher’s price. “We have a standard margin [price] that we add,” she said. However, she did not have those figures.
A key finding in the survey indicated that 12 percent of the students polled have instructors who sell books outside of the bookstore. On Wednesday, April 11, a long line of students waited outside of the F31 faculty offices to buy books from humanities instructor Bill Cleveland.
According to one of his students, Kimya Milania, Cleveland is the author of a class text for which he charges $58.
Another student in line that day, Christie Fremon, said that the reason Cleveland sells books outside of the bookstore is due to the bookstore’s mark-up on textbooks.
“I think that faculty should work through the bookstore. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time we could do a better job. This is our business. This is what we do,” Sack said.
Art instructor Catie Cadge said that she would not sell books outside of the bookstore. “What I do is make the publication and publisher available on the green sheet [so that] the student can go anywhere to get the book,” she said.
She said that some of her books are not textbooks, but are multicultural art books that aren’t mainstream, and therefore the bookstore sometimes may not have the text. She said that in that case she encourages students to buy from other bookstores.
Ladd said, “[students, in general, should] get a more standardized education. [Instructors] should be bringing other stuff in the classroom besides books.”
Fourteen percent of the students surveyed said that they have previously bought books online, but more than half of them said they just bought their books from the bookstore this quarter.
