Picture yourself onboard a flight home. While admiring the aerial view, you get the funny feeling you forgot something. While going over a mental checklist, you can’t think of any luggage missing, but then you look in your backpack and realize you left an EMIS manual in the lab. How do you find a thrifty replacement without the hassle?

During the spring break, you look up prices online on a website called Campus Books. It lists used manuals for $22.49 on Amazon and $24.76 on half.com by Ebay compared to a new manual for $39.75 at Barnes and Noble.com. You’re used to buying books at the bookstore. Would this be a better way?

Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Senior Lecturer Chris Anderson thinks so. “I typically buy them used [because they] are usually really cheap,” he said. “Though they’re listed as ‘used,’ in many cases, they’re brand new.” Anderson also added that he usually receives the books in four days. This method obviously has pros for professors as well as students.

Some students already show preference for the Internet over the bookstore. “[They’re] shipped to you where you don’t have to get out and purchase them.” advertising major Allison Forman said. Mechanical engineering major Greg Amundson explained that he would ideally purchase books online because of the money he would save. Older students well into their major also benefit from the online convenience. “I get my textbooks off half.ebay.com if I can find them,” engineering major and junior Zach Parvin said. “Textbook prices seem to grow every year if you buy them on campus [so] I [only] use the SMU bookstore as a last resort.”

Yes, the Internet can save you time and money. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. What’s the catch?

“You have to be careful that the seller has adequate credibility,” Parvin said. “You also have to make sure the edition number of the book is correct, and it is not always indicated on the website.” So you could wind up with the wrong textbook, and thus wait for another shipment. You decide to wait until after spring break and just go to the bookstores with the SMU Bookstore as the first stop.

At the SMU Bookstore, you can buy both new and used books with the option of selling them back instantly; a clear advantage over the internet in which you’d wait days – or even weeks – until the books arrive. When selling your books back, you of course don’t get full compensation as they (the books) are now considered “used.”

“Basically, we pay back 50 percent of the price they [the customers] pay for it,” Textbook Manager Andy Prycer said. “And [we] sell it for 75 percent of the new price if it has been re-adopted (means that it will be used for the upcoming semester).” Prycer explained that any books the store purchased goes through this process. So how effective is the beginning of this process? That depends on the communication between the store and the professors.

Before the coming semester, the bookstore staff tells professors to submit their back orders to let them know what is needed. “The more information we have from the professors, the better off we [the student body and the bookstore] are.” Of course, Prycer also indicated that the quantity of a book purchased will depend on how much is needed for the following semester. “Sometimes spring classes have 150 books and summer classes have around 20,” he said. By this time, the store might be preparing for summer courses, and your chances of finding a replacement manual are lower than they were earlier in the semester.

So suppose you go there and don’t find a new, or used, lab manual to replace the one you lost. You’ve already canceled out turning to the web, so you try the Varsity Bookstore on Hillcrest. According to Marketing Director Evan Horn, they specialize in used books; thus, you can both get the book instantly and not scorch your wallet. “The students are our priority,” Horn said. “We realize that college textbooks are expensive, [and] providing students with the option of saving money through used books, their dollar becomes more elastic.”

When you return the books, Varsity’s return policy is about the same as SMU Bookstore.

“[Students] will get more for their books the closer they bring them back to the end of the semester,” Don Hinderliter, a law student and Varsity employee, said. But he added that students who wait to return books should expect the store to already have the quota needed for the following semester. “[Thus] more likely they will get much less, generally wholesale, which is minimal.”

But you’ve already heard other students complain for other reasons aside from returning books. The most exasperating issue for most students is the cost. “It’s expensive at the bookstore, [and] it’s getting worse,” first-year advertising major Cody Shawver said.

Greg Amundson said that he buys books from the SMU Bookstore, but can’t see himself ever doing it again. “[It’s] expensive, and takes a lot of time.” he said. “This is my first year, but its so bad right now [that] I don’t see how it could get worse.”

But is it entirely the bookstores’ fault?

Not according to Dr. Timothy Crusius of the English Department. He did not attribute the increasing cost of textbooks to “publishers arbitrarily increasing prices,” and linked it instead to a dramatic increase in the cost of paper. “Current students are used to colorful and elaborate visual aids (graphics) in text, such as the overlay transparencies so common in science textbooks,” Crusius said. “These are very expensive to print.” He continued with how the SMU bookstore goes to great effort to find used textbooks, and buy new ones only when necessary.

He thinks that the bookstore takes measures to reduce the costs to students “as much as possible.” Finally, Crusius stressed people to keep costs in perspective. “[What] percentage of the total cost of attending SMU goes to books?” he asked. “I don’t know, but it can’t be more than a small fraction of the total figure [to go to SMU].”

Both students and employees alike can vouch for the bookstores’ advantages. “I just do what’s convenient, so I go to the SMU bookstore,” CCPA and anthropology double major Lauren Cameron said. “[It’s] definitely more expensive, [but] SMU Bookstore makes it easy though.”

She explained that during her freshman year, the bookstore boxed up all of her books after she sent them a list of her classes; so all she had to do was pay for them. Cameron explained that this saved her from “wandering around and sold out books.”

This is good to know if you have summer school as books may go fast. A good interaction between the student and the bookstore can put both parties better off. First-year advertising major Natalie Cecil said that she did something similar to Cameron’s approach for the spring semester. After getting her schedule, she fills out a form to SMU Bookstore so that they gather/order the books for her. “It’s convenient because you don’t have to rack your brain to get them,” she said. “It seems pretty well established — no loopholes [and] much better than my high school system.”