Online Services Open a New Chapter in Collegians’ Search for Cheaper Textbooks

The textbook price wars have begun.

College students have long relied on campus bookstores as the places to buy their textbooks at the start of each term, grumbling over the prices, but effectively trapped, since the stores have never had much competition.

Now the Internet is changing that--or threatening to.

Online retailers are suddenly crowding into the college textbook market, slashing prices and marketing relentlessly to lure students from campus stores. The firms often claim to offer discounts of up to 40% on books, plus the convenience of avoiding a trip to the bookstore.

“It was perfect,” said Rael Silva, a student at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, who recently ordered his physics book from Amazon.com after finding that his campus bookstore didn’t have it in stock. “It came out really fast--just two days. I was surprised.”

Amazon.com is not the only company in the business. Upstart competitors include Varsitybooks.com, BigWords.com, Ecampus.com, Classbooks.com and Textbooks.com. Lesser-known sites such as DuneBooks.com have also joined the fray. All are counting on students’ frustration with high book prices.

But beware the hype. Although online bookstores do offer new texts at lower prices in most cases, the savings may be small, and once shipping costs are factored in--plus time lost waiting for the book to arrive by mail--the campus bookstore may be more competitive than you would think.

Textbooks are expensive items, even if sold at cost, and profit margins are not large. Even the Web sites, although spared the costs of three-dimensional stores, have high marketing and start-up costs, say industry insiders.

For that reason, some online textbook peddlers are quickly moving toward selling other products, or seeking advertisers interested in marketing to college students. “We still view textbooks as an entry point into this marketplace,” said Matt Johnson, the 24-year-old chief executive of BigWords.com.

A quick examination of a few books used in the Los Angeles Community College District found that Web retailers do, on average, offer somewhat lower prices. But deep discounts are rare, and the determined bargain hunter is advised to do some thorough comparison shopping.

List prices posted by many of the Web sites to show how much cheaper their prices are than the bookstores’ were often higher than actual prices in local community college campus stores. Thus the online discounts looked much bigger than many were.

It’s also worth being wary about used-book prices online. The lower-price rule for new books is less consistent for used books advertised on Web sites, and the community college bookstores often have the same used books at lower prices.

That said, students looking for modest discounts have a variety of options.

Current textbook Web sites offer similar combinations of services and formats, some more unwieldy than others. A few have extensive lists of colleges and courses, so students can look up their class and find out what text they need without visiting the bookstore.

Some offer just new books, some a combination of new and used books; others have auction or buyback functions. Shipping rates vary, with a few sites, including BigWords.com and Ecampus.com, offering free shipping. Others have flat-rate shipping arrangements.

Will online services signal the end of college bookstores? Larry Daniels doesn’t think so. Associate executive director for industry services at the National Assn. of College Stores, he has high hopes for the group’s own new national Web site for member stores, Collegestore.com.

The site serves as an electronic arm of campus bookstores, offering many of the standard Web services, although without the discounts. It was launched partly to respond to new competition, he acknowledged. But bookstore managers have found that “it helps strengthen our relationship with the customer,” he said. “It allows [the campus stores] to have 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operations.”

Meanwhile, Efollett.com, the Web site for a privately owned chain of campus stores, has made a similar discovery. Half the students who used the site during a recent rush chose only to reserve books in that manner, preferring to go directly to campus bookstores to pick them up the old-fashioned way, said Tim Dorgan, a Follett senior vice president.

Dorgan said the phenomenon suggests that a combination of stores and Web sites may appeal to students more than mail-only operations.

But Silva, the online customer at College of the Desert, said price-consciousness among college students is so acute that the bookstores may be headed for trouble. “Everybody is complaining about prices of books,” he said.