Book Wars

Before facing a dizzying array of problem sets, response papers, and midterm examinations, Harvard undergraduates face shopping week woes: which courses to shop, which Core requirements to fulfill, how to balance extracurricular commitments with heavy course loads. And then, of course, there is book shopping.

Harvard professors, it seems, have a particular ability for picking expensive and hard-to-find textbooks for their reading lists. Students gripe that many professors require such books that they end up using very little.

The Harvard Square-based Coop, in name a cooperative but managed by Barnes and Noble since 1996, has long had a near-monopoly on textbooks. The majority of professors submit their course reading lists to the Coop so that its aisles are full of new books come shopping week. Many undergraduates feel as if they’re stuck buying books there, so as not to fall behind in a class or get stuck with the wrong edition of the text. The problem, however, is that books sold at the Coop tend to be considerably more expensive than the same books sold by online booksellers like Amazon.com or even other book stores.

This issue came to a head last week, when a troop of Undergraduate Council (UC) representatives marched into the Coop on a mission. Skipping through the aisles, the small army not-so-inconspicuously jotted down ISBN numbers of books for sale. Their hope was to collect these numbers for Crimsonreading.com, their own Web site that acts as a portal for online booksellers, which often sell textbooks (the same as the Coop’s) at much lower prices. The site does make a commission, though it donates its proceeds to charity.

Coop employees would have none of this, and they promptly expelled the UC members from the store, telling The Crimson that ISBN numbers are akin to their “intellectual property.” This is not shocking: Coop employees would like to keep their jobs. Allowing student government wonks disguised as customers to enter the Coop to gather inventory so they can compete with the Coop would undermine the store’s core business.

But the scene of last week is indicative of a larger problem that has little to do with the Coop, or even the UC. The problem is that professors are not taking simple steps to make it easy for their students to obtain course books at low cost.

The solution is almost too obvious: professors should publish the ISBN numbers of course-required texts in syllabi and course-wide emails in order to facilitate easy ordering by students. This is not an unreasonable request, given that professors submit their reading lists to the Coop several weeks before the semester begins.

Additionally, professors ought to design the first week or so of their courses in such a way that students who do choose to order books online—thus, having to wait longer for books—will not fall behind. Professors could achieve this by photocopying pertinent readings or assignments for students in the first week, or by posting assignments online.

Such an arrangement would provide students with the most choices. Those willing and financially able to purchase books at the Coop could do so, but students who were not in that boat would not be disadvantaged. And it would require almost no extra work for professors. Assuming syllabi were released early enough, UC representatives could collect ISBN numbers from the comfort of their own dorm room, the Coop would not be invaded, and students would save money. That’s a win-win situation if we have ever seen one.