Is the $40 worth the 10%?

Classes are starting again, and textbook buying is about to suck hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the Columbia student body. Trying to stay attractive to upperclassmen and introduce itself to freshmen, Book Culture has introduced a new deal for students. The 112th Street-based academic bookstore, with other locations at 114th and Broadway and 82nd and Columbus Avenue, now offers anyone with a valid student ID a blanket 10% discount on all goods at their Morningside Heights stores for a one-time fee of $40. Bwog sent amateur textbook buyer Ross Chapman to talk with Book Culture’s manager, Ryan Jaworski, and the creator of the discount, Cody Madsen.

Bwog: What is the new student discount?

Cody: Starting this semester, we’re offering a student membership for a one-time $40 fee. Students will get a 10% discount on all purchases at Book Culture. There are no exceptions, so it’s good for coursebooks, backpacks, regular book buying, and other things that we sell. It works in addition to the tax exemption that all of our coursebooks already have.

B: How did you come to the 10% and $40 figures?

C: We took a look at the sustaining membership we already had in place, and we built this membership with the idea mostly that it would appeal to freshmen. What would make sense for a four year career? Because the membership is free to renew every year, as long as you’re an active student. And so it breaks down to $5 a semester to save 10%.

B: That’s a great way to put it. The $40 number can be a bit intimidating, especially for upperclassmen, but $5 a semester is very reasonable.

Ryan: We also wanted people who are new to the Columbia community to know who we are and start shopping here. We’re a lot more than just a college textbook bookstore. We have a huge literature section, great stuff for grad students-
Cody: Pretty unparalleled poetry section… we’re really the last academic bookstore in Manhattan, in addition to carrying Columbia textbooks.

B: How is your relationship with professors at Columbia?

C: Really great. I think a lot of professors have chosen to list with us for all 17 years of the store’s life. There were times when there was no Barnes and Noble, and a lot of professors were listing here, and that’s come down a little bit, but a lot of professors have chosen to stay with us.
R: There are quite a few professors who only list with us. We’ve cultivated that relationship. We do a lot of events with professors, we carry their books. We really try to do a good job of representing the intellectual work that’s coming out of the Columbia community.

B: How do different types of textbooks (e.g. CC literature vs. chemistry textbooks) interact with the student membership?

C: The student membership definitely makes sense for anyone who thinks they’ll spend close to $400 in the whole tenure of their career. If the professor’s listed with us for some of the science or architecture or engineering classes, just buying one or two books will get you pretty close.
R: A lot of English majors also, all of their classes as an undergrad will be listed here. You can do two books as a chem major, and you can also do 40 books as an English major, and it’s a different calculus depending on the subject you’re studying.

B: How does the 10% discount compare to discounts student might find shopping online?

C: With a lot of different books it can vary. Luckily, because of the history of the store, we have a lot of good relationships, especially with university presses. Sometimes, even online, you’re not really able to get more than a couple percent discount if you go to Amazon or something.
R: The economics are often such that they print so few of certain books that they’re never that discounted elsewhere. The thing about the books that we’re listing is that they’re 10% off the list price. Even at Amazon, and most places online, they’re going to be selling at or very close to the list price for new books.

B: The list price is the suggested price printed on the back of the book, right?

R: It’s a bit stronger than “suggested.” It’s the price that the publisher gives. It affects the cost of the book.
C: We as a bookstore make a pretty strong decision to support the price of books as reported by publishing houses. If they told us that this book is worth $65 or $25, we want to honor that. And it fits into the way that the books are sold to us. Especially with academic books, a lot of times, those are sold basically at cost to retailers. There’s a chance that we might lose money on some of those books when we sell them at the discount, but I think what’s really important is that students know that we’re here.
R: And that’s especially true with the large, very expensive textbooks. The [profit] margins on those are actually very small, despite the cost. The discount that the publisher gives us on that is very small compared to most books.
C: It’s pretty counterintuitive. Usually the industry standard for books is somewhere between 40 and 50 percent. Academic presses, it’s usually less than that. And with some of the bigger, for-profit academic presses, some of the ones that make the textbooks that change every six months, those margins are miniscule.
R: Sometimes we even end up buying a book at the list price, just because there’s no other option available for us, because we want to have that book for the professor and the students.

B: Why doesn’t the student discount apply to online purchases?

C: One of the complications we’ve had with our web services with some of the other offers we’ve had is that the website doesn’t do a very good realtime. It only updates every day, and it doesn’t demonstrate that we have used books. The information on our website comes from a third party, it comes from the American Booksellers Association, so we don’t have a lot of control over what we do there. So we don’t want people trying to buy something that we really can’t order for them, and we also want people to know that we have a lot of other things.

B: How do you guys feel about ebooks and PDFs in the classroom?

C: I think each professor takes a look at what’s going to work best for them and their students. With the calculus books that we’re selling, for instance, I think the department switched to loose leaf and WebAssign.
R: For us, traditionally, those books have never been the main thing. For a lot of the big textbook orders, we don’t even get orders for them, but we go through Courseworks, see what we bought last year, and find those books and order them anyway. I think, personally, and I think a lot of professors feel this way too, that it’s an obscene cost for some of these books.
C: Especially for some of the literature classes, and the MESAAS classes, a lot of those books, you might reference for three years, so it makes sense to have your own copy. That’s part of the robustness of those departments with us. A lot of these, you’re going to be reusing or referencing.

B: What services other than bookselling do you offer?

R: The other thing that’s important to remember in terms of what we do is that we also have a really strong buyback program. We pay more than Barnes and Noble, and we buy back throughout the year, and not necessarily just textbooks.
C: [The money we pay back] is very strongly case-by-case. We have to take into consideration the condition, the viability for us to sell it again, if it’s something that’s constantly listed.  And whatever the value is for the books, we give 50% more in store credit.

B: You sell a lot other than just books. What do you like selling, and what sells well?

C: What’s really astounding is that all of the sidelines do really well. Our sideline buyer does a great job finding things that pair naturally with books. You know, backpacks, notebooks… writing and reading go pretty hand-in-hand. Even some of the lighter home decor things do really well in this neighborhood, for dorm rooms and for some of our customers who aren’t students. We have a line of literary themed candles, that have a Jane Austen scent, or an Edgar Allen Poe scent. And the Out Of Print t-shirts are great. They’re old book covers on shirts. They all kind of fit in to the book persona.

B: What sorts of advertising does Book Culture do?

C: A lot of our advertising comes from a few main media sources. We have an active e-mail list with something like 40,000 people across all three stores. A lot of our events get listed from places from the New Yorker to the New York Times to DNAinfo. Sometimes we will buy ads in a lot of student papers and publications. We get a lot of requests for that, and we’re normally pretty happy to buy whatever makes sense for that kind of advertising. But I think our biggest resource is grassroots, word of mouth. When people come here, especially if they’re here without a direct focus, when they get to spend some time here, they really grow to love it. It’s really a priceless experience.
R: It’s a really rare thing, actually, in the city, to find a used bookstore, especially one that carries a lot of academic titles. It’s really something that could only exist in this community, by being so close to Columbia. It’s just a really symbiotic relationship. It’s great.

Book Culture relies heavily on its relationship with Columbia students and the textbook season. About 25% of the 112th Street annual sales come from coursebooks, and a third of those occur in a stampede during the first week of the school year. Aside from the huge coursebook sections, Book Culture also sells new literature and poetry, chapbooks (short, small release poetry and fiction booklets), remainders (books at the end of their publication cycle, located on the stairs), and a number of sideline items such as backpacks, notebooks, and home decor.

Edit, 9/11, 4:40 p.m.: This article originally stated that the student discount functions at all stores, as opposed to just the Morningside Heights locations. It also incorrectly called chapbooks “chatbooks.” Bwog apologizes for these errors.

Book Culture logo via their tumblr.