Nothing is more aggravating and tedious than the annual ritual of buying and selling textbooks for our students.
What most of us have done, for years, is anticipate how many textbooks we'll need for our classes, order the textbooks, and then sell them to families during registration.
There are a number of problems. First, it's hard to estimate need accurately. Inevitably, we'll over or under order. If we under order, we've got unhappy families whose students must begin the year without textbooks, waiting for the new order to arrive. If we over-order, we either must send back the books (and pay the postage) or inventory the books for next year, and hope that the publisher doesn't change editions (which they do at irritatingly frequent intervals). If publishers do change editions, the school is stuck with the past editions in their inventory. We never had a bookstore that didn't have three to four thousand dollars worth of books, rotting on shelves in our bookstore. Not only that--which of us has extra room to store all of these books?
And woe to the person who is gracious enough (unlucky enough) to be the school's book-store manager. It's almost a full time summer job, and a thankless one at that, and we in Catholic schools usually can't afford to pay this person what he truly deserves.
The whole thing's a mess.
Until, in 2007, we got out of the book business, by signing on with an online bookstore vendor.
With an on line vendor, the school sends the book list to the vendor, with the ISBN #'s. The vendor sets up an on line bookstore, ala amazon.com. Parents are sent a link to the vendor's bookstore, and asked to order books at least two weeks in advance. The school has ZERO responsibilities thereafter. All orders, book returns due to schedule changes or mistakes and other problems are handled by the vendor.
To assist parents who are bargain shoppers, we also include an excel spread sheet of all the school's textbooks, with ISBN#'s, as an online link. (Including the ISBN #'s are a must, or parents will buy the wrong editions of texts.) If parents think our vendor's prices are too high, they can search for those same books from used book vendors at cheaper prices. Many get the books for half, one-third, or one quarter off the new book price.
Most of these on line vendors will even give a school the option to make a few dollars by a small surcharge on the book prices. I declined this, trying to keep book prices as low as possible for our families. I didn't care if the school made any money--I was just grateful not to LOSE any and to be free of the aggravations.
If you're not using an on line vendor, I promise you won't regret doing so.
What most of us have done, for years, is anticipate how many textbooks we'll need for our classes, order the textbooks, and then sell them to families during registration.
There are a number of problems. First, it's hard to estimate need accurately. Inevitably, we'll over or under order. If we under order, we've got unhappy families whose students must begin the year without textbooks, waiting for the new order to arrive. If we over-order, we either must send back the books (and pay the postage) or inventory the books for next year, and hope that the publisher doesn't change editions (which they do at irritatingly frequent intervals). If publishers do change editions, the school is stuck with the past editions in their inventory. We never had a bookstore that didn't have three to four thousand dollars worth of books, rotting on shelves in our bookstore. Not only that--which of us has extra room to store all of these books?And woe to the person who is gracious enough (unlucky enough) to be the school's book-store manager. It's almost a full time summer job, and a thankless one at that, and we in Catholic schools usually can't afford to pay this person what he truly deserves.
The whole thing's a mess.
Until, in 2007, we got out of the book business, by signing on with an online bookstore vendor.
With an on line vendor, the school sends the book list to the vendor, with the ISBN #'s. The vendor sets up an on line bookstore, ala amazon.com. Parents are sent a link to the vendor's bookstore, and asked to order books at least two weeks in advance. The school has ZERO responsibilities thereafter. All orders, book returns due to schedule changes or mistakes and other problems are handled by the vendor.
To assist parents who are bargain shoppers, we also include an excel spread sheet of all the school's textbooks, with ISBN#'s, as an online link. (Including the ISBN #'s are a must, or parents will buy the wrong editions of texts.) If parents think our vendor's prices are too high, they can search for those same books from used book vendors at cheaper prices. Many get the books for half, one-third, or one quarter off the new book price.
Most of these on line vendors will even give a school the option to make a few dollars by a small surcharge on the book prices. I declined this, trying to keep book prices as low as possible for our families. I didn't care if the school made any money--I was just grateful not to LOSE any and to be free of the aggravations.
If you're not using an on line vendor, I promise you won't regret doing so.
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