As Textbooks Go Digital, Campus Bookstores May Go Bookless

By Jeffrey R. Young
The Chronicle of Higher Education

The face of the director of the U. of Kansas bookstore, Estella McCollum, is reflected in the console for a print-on-demand service she helped to set up. Called Jayhawk Ink, it could clear shelf space for other products.
Photo - Eli Reichman for The Chronicle


As students cut costs by buying books from cheaper online retailers or by downloading e-textbooks, campus bookstores sell fewer and fewer textbooks. That's triggering an identity crisis for one of the oldest institutions on campus and leading some college officials to ask: If textbooks go digital, does the campus even need a bookstore?

"Book sales are declining—they're down tremendously this year," says DeAnn Hazey, executive director of the National Association of College Stores Foundation. "The college stores have to find other ways and other categories" to make money, she says, "otherwise they won't survive."

So bookstores at many colleges are preparing for a bookless future with new services they hope will keep students coming: performance spaces for in-store concerts, multimedia stations for printing digital photos, and even dry cleaning. Most store managers I talked with hoped to drop the word "book" from the sign out front.

"I say I'm a buggy-whip salesman," quipped Liz Hale, manager of bookstore services at Bellingham Technical College, in Washington, where she has been advocating changes in the campus store. "I personally believe that the textbook in its current incarnation is as obsolete as buggy whips that people used to steer when we had horses and carriages."

Buggy whips aren't on the shelves, but walking into many campus bookstores does feel like stepping back in time. Many are run directly by the nonprofit colleges they serve, so they've had little financial pressure to make the cosmetic improvements in lighting and shelving that chain retailers have. Some look like relics as a result.

But their success has never been measured purely in dollars. The main mission of most campus bookstores has been to give students a convenient source of textbooks. For generations that role went unchallenged.

The full story at The Chronicle of Higher Education