BY JORDYN FORTE
After spending nearly $800 to rent three textbooks from the Stonehill Bookstore during her first semester at Stonehill, Hailey Romero decided to look elsewhere for her course materials.
Now, as a junior, Romero said she uses a variety of different sellers to obtain her textbooks.
“I usually rent my textbooks through Amazon and get them digitally on the Kindle app for Mac,” Romero said. “If I’m getting novels for English courses, I’ll buy old and used books off of Amazon for anywhere for $1 and $10.”
“[Spending $800] was absurd to me, and I never spent another dollar buying from the bookstore after that,” she explained. “The on-campus bookstore is overpriced in my opinion, which is probably why most […] students depend on other resources to get their required class texts.”
While store manager Mary Duncklee said that the Bookstore cannot compete with Amazon and other online sellers, there are still some benefits to purchasing or renting books on campus.
“Sometimes our prices are better than or close to [those of other online retailers],” Duncklee said. “You can use your Hill Card here, plus you have the convenience of returning in the store, [and] also the convenience of returning [course materials] if you drop the class.”
Like Romero, junior Hannah Capron said she, too, often buys her textbooks from third-party sites, though she acknowledged the convenience of utilizing the Bookstore.
“I honestly buy most of my books from Chegg, because they tend to have cheaper prices than our bookstore,” Capron explained. “The bookstore occasionally has better prices, and the location is definitely convenient, but third-party sites often have the best deals.”
According to the findings of a survey conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of Cengage, approximately 85 percent of respondents – current and former students – said that obtaining course materials, namely textbooks, is financially stressful – even more so than meal and food, healthcare, and housing, which 63 percent, 69 percent, and 73 percent of respondents found financially stressful, respectively.
Data collected of 1,651 current and former students between the ages of 18-30 found that the burden of textbook expenses is only trumped by that of tuition and fees.
Similarly to her peers, junior Jenn Loveland also finds herself renting her textbooks through off-campus resources due to high on-campus prices.
“I always rent my books. Always,” Loveland said. “My books were almost $400 this semester and that is because I was unable to find a cheaper option for my education class, and that class required three books all priced at $60 and $30 – books that I will only use once.”
“I think that professors really need to think about their sources because some books are not worth their price for the time we spend on them,” Loveland said.
In addition to high prices, Loveland expressed concern over fluctuating prices at the Bookstore, too.
“You can look on the bookstore one day and see the price as $30 and then come back a week later and see the price as $60,” she said. “It’s unfair to have the same book as my peers and wonder if I potentially had to pay more money than them when it came from the same place.”
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