Tuesday’s Ann Arbor Chronicle has an open letter from the owner of the Shaman Drum Bookshop. His store has apparently suffered even more than most. The biggest problem? Textbooks:
The crisis at Shaman Drum Bookshop is due to our loss of textbook sales. This fall the university introduced a program which allows professors to list their textbooks online, which effectively drives a significant number of students to the internet. It is impossible for local textbook stores to compete under these circumstances.
Textbooks are an ongoing problem at our store, though in different ways and to a much lesser degree, since we have never had a specific focus on them. While there are several universities in the area, there isn’t one quite as near us as the University of Michigan is to them.
But we have a recurring scenario several times a day: a customer rushes in or calls us, looking for a very specific book, often with the ISBN or edition number. The book is a text for a relatively obscure field and costs somewhere around $100. We don’t have it, but might be able to order it. The customer goes into wide-eyed panic: “But I need it tomorrow!”
My mind continues to boggle at this. We can guess that the customer needs it for a class. We can also guess that the teacher, at least, knew some time in advance what books the class would use. (I doubt that many teachers, in the midst of a lecture, suddenly say, “Aha! I just realized that you all need to get the thirteenth edition of New Perspectives in Cinematic Mesopotamian Nephrology for Thursday’s session.”) We can suspect that the list of books would have been given out at the first session of the class, or even supplied to the students when they signed up for the class.
Yet the customer comes to us at the very last minute, surprised that we don’t have the book. And the failure is somehow ours.
If the teachers could just let us know that they will be sending people to us for specific books, we might be able to have more of them in stock. But the requests would have to be pretty specific.
I had one particularly maddening case yesterday, in which the teacher did the right thing, but the information slipped:
A student came in, looking for a very specific book. We didn’t list it in stock, and, in fact, it appeared to be out of print. The student was quite upset, since she said that the teacher had assured them that our store had it.
I tried to order it through our nifty new ordering system. We couldn’t get at the book (though, to my relief, we somehow managed not to have a network failure while searching this time). When I tried the old backup system (for which I needed a manager’s approval), we found that one of our warehouses reported having some copies. The customer ordered one, though she was nervous that it might take as long as a week for it to get here.
About an hour later, I was at checkout for the first time that day. There, behind the counter, I saw a stack of some half a dozen copies of that book, being held for students of a class at a local university. I hadn’t known of this when the customer was here, and hadn’t thought to ask my coworkers if we had them since, in seemingly identical circumstances in the past, these things were rarely on hold.
So the customer really did have a legitimate reason to believe that our specific store would have that specific book. While she will get the book, she’s less satisfied than she could have been.
Otherwise, the textbook business is, by all evidence, a racket. There are ways that people try to get around it, but students still need to get ahold of the very expensive books somehow.
If there’s any area in which eBooks can and probably should take over, it’s here. The economics of producing and distributing textbooks just don’t seem to work, and the student gets stuck with the frustration and the bill.
The letter points out just how doomed the business model is. Unfortunately, it may drag some good stores down with it.
Are the rest of you finding situations like this? Have other stores found more effective ways of dealing with textbook crises?
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