Online booksellers have allowed students to save money on course materials at the expense of brick-and-mortar college bookstores. 

But Kennel Bookstore at Fresno State has utilized Immediate Access (IA) courses to compete with online pricing while staying within students’ budgets. 

Dusty Guthier, course materials manager for Kennel Bookstore, said that over the past few years, IA courses have grown exponentially, allowing students to purchase cheaper books that live in students’ Canvas accounts. 

“We started with nine courses. We started with about 400 students. This semester is our largest semester in three years,” he said. “We have 14,500 students in the program. We have 326 courses, and we have a savings calculation of over $2 million in savings to the students in this program, and that’s just for spring ‘20.”

Guthier admitted that online booksellers have made it difficult to compete with students’ budgets.

“We understand that books are expensive, and we want them to understand that we are looking for all kinds of ways to keep costs low,” he said. “Our first priority is not making money; our first priority is and always will be students, and it doesn’t do a bookstore any good if you can’t service the students by looking at the profit dollars.” 

Guthier said the costs are lowered for Kennel Bookstore as well because shipping, returning and labor costs are eliminated with IA courses. 

“Obviously online competition has hurt a lot of bookstores, only because they have the ability to offer a lower price that we can offer, because we are pricing based on the publisher’s price to us,” Guthier said. 

The Kennel Bookstore won’t always be the cheapest nor the most expensive. Nevertheless, Guthier encourages students to find the cheapest vendor, assuming it’s the correct book for the class. 

He has described IA as a “win-win” for both faculty and students. Faculty know students have the correct course materials, and students automatically receive the book on the first day of the semester at a fraction of the cost. 

Students can choose whether to opt in or out of the program, allowing them to stay in control of how much money they spend on books. The program has grown in popularity because of its benefits.

Guthier explained the science behind cheap books from online vendors — and the low prices don’t last long. When there is a surplus of books from the publisher, online vendors sell them for a fraction of the cost. That surplus will run out and the price will go back up, he warned.  

“Online is only as good as the surplus that they have. So once you run out of the surplus, or if the demand is there, there’s an algorithm in place that raises that price,” Guthier said. 

Kona April Vu, a pre-nursing student, said that she appreciates online textbooks because her science books can be expensive. 

“There was one semester where I was taking physics, biology and chemistry within the same semester,” Vu said, “and they all had their lab materials and their lab manuals and their textbooks that I had to buy separately. So that was a really expensive year.” 

She said that minimal changes in new editions of books can be frustrating. 

“Different professors use different books, and they’re not all agreeing on the same textbook,” she said. “And the textbooks, despite that they’re an edition apart, are all the same. They really are.” 

However, some of her professors have accommodated by using lectures to teach newer material, while suggesting students buy an older and cheaper edition of the required textbook.

“I think that professors are now more understanding of how textbooks are becoming really expensive, so they’re allowing us the option to either purchase books from older editions or to utilize the ones that are online,” she said. 

Vu also mentioned her appreciation toward professors who are honest about how much students will use the textbooks in their courses. If it’s just a reference rather than an integral part of the course, Vu thinks twice about purchasing the book.

Dr. Kelley McCoy, a mass communications professor at Fresno State, said that her textbooks are an integral part of the course. However, she prefers IA courses because the material is readily available for students on the first day. 

“There are also students who prefer to go elsewhere because, quite frankly, they’re still finding lower prices,” McCoy said.

McCoy said that when she started teaching at Fresno State in 2007, the majority of her students purchased books from Kennel Bookstore. In recent years, students have been purchasing books from Amazon and other various online book sellers.

But she said IA courses are a way for college bookstores to “stay in the game, so to speak.”

“The cost of textbooks is utterly outrageous, and there are so many other financial demands that students face,” McCoy said, “Any time we can save them money, we should try to do that.” 

She said the IA program gives students an opportunity to not pay as much as they would for hardcopies. She also said that it’s more convenient because it’s immediately connected to Canvas, giving students access from day one. 

McCoy mentioned that some students opt out of the IA program because they would rather learn from a hardcopy. 

“They can make notes in the margins and find it easier to commit information to memory and they actually can interact with pages like that,” McCoy said. 

However, Guthier said online books are becoming more interactive and advanced with more options to annotate and highlight throughout the textbooks. 

“This is a good opportunity for bookstores, if they so choose, to kind of reinvent themselves in a new digital world,” McCoy said.