Matt Weir / The Collegian
As the end of the semester approaches and there are no more book reports or reading assignments, students will have to decide what to do with their textbooks.
There are different options that students can do: sell them back for an economic incentive, donate them to support a good cause, return them if they rent them or keep them for future reference.
For those students who would prefer to sell their textbooks and get some money back, there are two main options: sell them at Fresno State Kennel Bookstore or sell them online.
“You can go online and see what we are paying for the price before having to stand in line and see if it’s worth it,” Ron Durham said, Kennel Bookstore director. He said the textbooks’ prices change daily because they are determined by the faculty who decide which textbooks to use during each semester.
Durham also said the Kennel Bookstore, which is a non-profit owned by the California State University, Fresno Auxiliary Corporations, will be having its textbook buyback period from Dec. 7 to Dec. 17.
“When you sell your books back there are really two possible people buying it: the Kennel Bookstore or a private used book company,” Durham said. “If you get 50 percent back from what you paid for the book, Kennel Bookstore is buying it back.”
Durham said students sometimes don’t get half because a private profit used book company bought it, and they determined the price of it.
“You get half of what you paid for it,” book department manager Susan Bartel reiterated. “If you bought it new, you get half of the new price and if you bought it used, you get half of used price.”
But some students say that the bookstore’s buy back policy isn’t all it seems to be.
Liberal studies major Melisandi Raya, 23, said she bought her textbooks online and plans to sell them back online because they pay more.
“They give you so little here,” Raya said. “They say [they] will give 50 percent of what you bought them for, but in reality they give you less.”
If students cannot sell back their textbooks to the Kennel Bookstore, they also take donations. Bartel said they donate all the books to Dr. William Rice from the Craig School of Business and the marketing and logistics department, who then ships them to Armenia, and to the Golden Key International Honour Society, which has a partnership with Better World Books, an online book seller organization that raises funds for world literacy.
“When the books are collected here in the store, we just kind of divide them in half and send half to Dr. Rice and to the Golden Key,” Bartel said.
Child development major Araceli Perez said she has donated some of her textbooks to the Kennel Bookstore.
“The books that they don’t accept for return backs, I usually put them in the donation box, so I don’t keep them,” Perez said. She also said she has given some of textbooks to the Salvation Army in downtown Fresno.
Junior student Yesenia Cruz, a social work major, said she knows of another place where students can donate their textbooks to migrant students; the University Migrant Services coordinated by Raul Moreno.
“I think they share your books with other students who don’t have money to buy their books,” Cruz said.
Some students don’t have to worry about what to do with their textbooks, as they rented them from Chegg.com
“[I will] return them,” freshman Conjellyfer Galang said, who rented some of her textbooks from Chegg.com because she was not able to find used books in the Kennel Bookstore.
Fresno State freshman student Chongtoua Mouavangsou plans to use the old textbooks in other ways.
“I am planning to let my friend borrow [them],” Mouavangsou said. “If not, I might as well keep them.”
Kennel Bookstore Associate Director and Merchandise Manager Jack Garner said that graduate students tend to cling a little bit more to their textbooks than freshmen and sophomore students.
“I usually save them [textbooks] for myself because I am planning to use them in the future, eventually when I teach,” Hipolito Ortiz, a master’s student, said.
He also said that when he was an undergraduate student, he sold some of his textbooks, but now for the last two semesters he has been saving them for himself.
Other students like Senior Gifford Samuel, who are in a professional career in which they need their books for reference, are also planning to keep their textbooks.
“I am a history major and so a lot of my textbooks I actually want to hang on to for later in my career when I am a teacher,” said Gifford. “I can kind of reference them for different periods in history.”