Editor,
I just read the letter "Bookstore strives to make books more affordable" published in Wednesday's Daily Lobo. I found the title itself to be unbelievable. For college students, it all comes down to the price of textbooks. When I first came to UNM in 2002, I bought all my books at the Bookstore. I consistently paid more than $300 a semester for books, which I got less than $100 for buybacks. That's a lot of depreciation for 16 weeks. After a year or two in college, online used-textbook companies came into the picture. For the last two years, I have not spent more than $200 for a semester's worth of books, and I usually can sell them online to another student for between 70 percent and 100 percent of what I paid. Now that Half.com and similar sites have been around for a while, students are starting to wise up to the UNM Bookstore. The Bookstore seems to be trying to fight back by not putting textbook ISBN numbers on their Web site and covering the actual ISBN with a sticker on each book.
Let's face it: We college students got wise to the Bookstore's excessively high prices. If the Bookstore can't find a better way to compete than the 50 percent buyback, students are going to spend less time walking to the Bookstore and more time clicking "proceed to checkout."
Matt Henderson
UNM student
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