The High Cost of Used Textbooks
Regarding the letter from Jonathan Cohen (Dec. 30), who was complaining about the price of used textbooks at the UC Santa Barbara student store: I am happy to read he is not a business major. The junior college I went to while pursuing a history degree had the same sort of deal where it paid about half of the price to the students selling used texts back to the store and then charged two-thirds the new price for used books.
I solved this problem for myself and some fellow students by selling my used texts to them for some figure in between the half-price buyback price and the used-book price.
In the case of Cohen’s $33.70 math text, he could have sold it to a fellow student for $25, saving the student $8.70 and getting $10 more for it than the bookstore would give him.
This system only failed if there was no certainty that the professor was going to use the same text the next year. A little college-level ingenuity can go a long ways in bypassing a bad system.
LINDA LOUISE ROBINETT
Port Hueneme
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