At ETSU professors have ordered books for the upcoming semester, and students are beginning to think about selling back used books. The pain of buying them for their spring courses is still weeks off.

A bookstore check early in the fall 2008 term found the priciest book: For the chemistry class Instrumental Analysis, the textbook Principles of Instrumental Analysis cost $210 in the campus bookstore ($120 on Half.com).  In the chemistry class that used the book, only one of 20 students didn’t buy the book online.

“I wanted to eat this semester,” Cameron, one of the students in class, answers to the question, why didn't you buy it in the bookstore?

Sara, another student, paid $197 for the book, and she felt she was more or less forced to buy it at that price because she switched classes and needed the book immediately. She didn’t even go to the bookstore on campus to make a price comparison. “I know that the books are cheaper at SBX,” she said.

“They are about 20-30 percent more expensive in the campus bookstore,” Cameron adds. He bought his textbook online for approximately $60 at amazon.com, and he’s happy about it even though he got the international version, instead of the U.S. one. But he also says that if he absolutely had to, he would have bought the book in the bookstore, but online always comes first.

Craig Birdwell, manager at the campus bookstore, says that students usually pay between $25 and $150 per textbook. “It differs a lot from classes to classes depending on what kind of book the professor wants,” he said. Also, students typically buy their books at the beginning of the semester and pay a total of about $300-$400 that one time, he said.

The reason why some books may cost a bit more than others usually depends upon how much the publisher decides the markup to be at. Also, the university wants 20 percent of the price of the book, according to the contract the campus bookstore signed with the university. According to Birdwell, those two factors make the price on the book so high.

According to Dr. Chu-Ngi Ho, Principles of Instrumental Analysis is the best book and even though he has other choices, he doesn’t think any of them live up to this particular book. He is aware that it is expensive and encourages the students to shop around. And, he adds, “Students can use the previous edition; they just need to update some parts of it. But I’ll show them, it’s no problem.”

The pricey text is only used for that particular class and though a student could pass the class with just taking notes, the student  aiming for a higher grade needs the book.