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June 7, 2005
Campus Bookstores
We're having some unrest about our 'College Store,' as we assiduous call it (to avoid 'Book Store,' I suppose). There is talk about moves to move all the books to the basement and cease to carry so many trade books. Insinuations of vile commerce in enlogoed sweatshirts intrude. Since I do all my book shopping on Amazon or at used bookstores in Ithaca, Rochester, or Syracuse, this doesn't cause me much pause.
A group of Faculty see our college bookstore's trade and children's sections as providing the closest thing to a commercial bookstore in Geneva -- and I suppose they're right. That's a kind of service to our local community, like the radio station.
I fear, though, that this is one part of online shopping that has utterly changed my life. If I want a book and it's not here I'm not willing to wait the weeks it takes local bookshops to get it for me. I never liked waiting and now I don't have to. Between Amazon and Abebooks I really don't have to put up with the lamentable ignorance of clerks; I haven't been in a serious new books bookstore where I met clerks who knew a lot more than me about a lot of subjects since Oxford closed in Atlanta. I've been in used bookstores with excellent staff, but given how few of the retail experiences in America that describes, I'll stick to online shopping. I don't know how much good the service has to do to make it necessary for our institution to provide it (an no one so far has made any claims about the amount of use the community makes of our bookstore).
Now what to do about textbooks? I would say close down the book section, sell more sweatshirts, and let students order THOSE online, too, but I haven't experimented with the online textbook suppliers.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at June 7, 2005 11:49 AM