Book costs depend on subject, publisher

By Ryan Neubert
The Manifest staff writer

Every year we have the big bill of paying our tuition. It seems though, that there is another cost that seems to be going up every year and that is the cost of books.
Ever wonder why campus bookstores don’t keep using the old edition or why you don’t get any money back from reselling a book?
Everyone seems to know Kathy Claycomb, who runs the bookstore at UW-Marinette. She can help answer your bookstore questions, but so can Scott Ward, (UW-Marinette position) in regards to questions about book pricing, buyback, and new editions.
So why do books seem to cost so much.
“Some of the ways that book prices are determined is there the list price and the retail price,” he stated. “Kathy is able to get a discount from a few of the publishers which mean that she is saving us money, with some of these discounts ranging between 20-40 percent.”
Another question was asking about books and why some can be used for multiple years and some only for a year? This rested with the publisher and faculty. We may think ‘why do they need to get the new edition and have us pay a lot of money for that book.’ Well, the reason that professors do this is because they can only use a certain book for so long until they have to get with the times. This goes into the next question of who decides what book is used for a class and again this rests with the faculty.
Then the day comes when students get to go back to the book store and sell our books back. It seems that we never get enough back for what we paid, so here were some answers I got from Ward.
“The bookstore has a 50-percent buyback of new purchases and if selling back a used book, if it was 75 dollars you can expect somewhere around 50 dollars back,” he explained. “It depends on the set on demand from wholesalers, whose resell ranges from 0-30-percent.”
If there was one thing I learned from this interview is that our professors are trying their hardest in trying to save us money by reusing books as long as they can. Another is that Kathy Claycomb is another person that does a lot in trying to save us money on books.