It’s the week before classes start and you’re finally settling in to order your books from the WSU Bookie. You log into myWSU, click the Bookie icon and a popup displays all the required course materials for the upcoming semester.

Quick and simple, with convenient on-campus pick up. The only issue? Price.

The Bookie’s website is full of little red banners that claim you’ll save 80 percent when you purchase a used edition of a textbook from them, but a quick check of other book sellers like Amazon or eBay’s Half.com and you’ll realize that the Bookie is a little generous with their savings calculations.

Take one of my required books for example: a used copy of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases, by Philip Patterson, goes for $66 at the Bookie. The same edition of the book, also used, goes for $26.42 and $22.49 on Amazon and Half.com respectively. That’s a 60 percent difference between Amazon’s price and the Bookie’s price – so while the Bookie offers you 55 percent in savings from the brand-new price, you could be saving 85 percent instead.

Amazon and Half.com also offer 125-day rentals of a used copy of Media Ethics, at $16.06 and $19.62 respectively. The Bookie only offers new rentals for this book, going at a whopping $117.35.

Meanwhile, a new copy of the same book goes for as high as $139.09 and $104 on Amazon and Half.com compared to $146.70 at the Bookie. In addition to its high price, Amazon offers books labeled as new from hosted sellers for as low as $22.95. Half.com also has a similar setup with prices as low as $60.

So those savings the Bookie gleefully offers? They’re calculated from the store’s bloated prices, guaranteeing profit for the Bookie and duping students into thinking they’re saving money.

If that doesn’t make you swear off buying from the Bookie ever again, I don’t know what will.

Another great aspect of sellers like Amazon and Half.com is the ability to sell most of your books back to them for a reasonable portion of the original purchase price.

I’ve sold textbooks back to Amazon and received between $70 and $99 gift cards – which I used to buy books for the next semester.

You can also become a seller yourself and competitively list your books in order to get actual cash instead of gift cards.

The Bookie will also give cash for books, but sometimes at significantly low rates – which guarantees resale profit.

According to a May 2016 report by the Course Materials Cost Reduction Task Force, a collaboration between WSU Provost Dan Bernardo and ASWSU, the sell back prices for books can be as low as $1 because “the faculty teaching the course for the next term has yet to get his/her book order in, or has specified a newer edition, devaluing the current edition.”

This prevents students from getting a fair price for the books they no longer need, which can be critical to how much students can spend on next semester’s materials.

In 2014, a Student Public Interest Research Group survey found that 65 percent of students reported they skipped buying a textbook because of the price and 94 percent of those students said they were concerned that not having the book would hurt their grade.

In response to this statistic, Rebecca Van de Vord, committee lead for the Course Materials Cost Reduction Task Force, said the university is looking into open educational resources (OERs) – openly licensed materials that are freely accessible to the public – as an alternative to our current textbook-oriented culture.

“The open educational resource movement is, in comparison to publishers and textbooks, a very new movement,” Van de Vord said. “Much of what we’re planning to do this year is to provide workshops, support and information on what’s available, and seed grants for faculty to review existing open educational resources.”

OERs are still far from being implemented at WSU as a whole, but in the meantime there are plenty of options to save on course materials. Talk to students who’ve taken the class before or read about your professor on websites like Rate My Professors to see what others have to say about each instructor’s use of course materials.

For those of you who’ve already spent a fortune at the Bookie, remember that there’s still time to look for cheaper alternatives. The Bookie issues full refunds for all purchases and rentals until Saturday, August 27.

And if they ask you why you’re returning your book, be honest – someone else had it cheaper.

Alysen Boston is a senior communication major from Baltimore, Maryland. She can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of The Office of Student Media.