Bookstore opens for buyback season

Store has location near Yello Sub

Beat The Bookstore will sell nothing but textbooks. The business owners say their business model is different than most college bookstores.

By Matt Erickson (Contact)

Friday, April 27th, 2007

The new off-campus bookstore opening for the spring textbook buyback season will look markedly different from Lawrence’s existing bookstores – it will sell nothing but textbooks.

Beat The Bookstore, at 12th and Indiana streets, next to Yello Sub, opens next week. It won’t offer iPods, KU basketball T-shirts, or even pens and paper. And it will use a business model different from most college bookstores that its owners say will translate to lower prices and higher buyback offers.

“The business concept is buy books for more and sell them for less,” said Dan Keating, the store’s co-owner. “And we cater more to students.”

More than 90 percent of the textbooks the store offers are used books. Comparatively, KU Bookstores used inventory is 38 percent, which is still higher than the industry average.

The Lawrence franchise will be the 25th Beat The Bookstore location to open across the country. Each store uses the network of stores to its advantage.

Beat The Bookstore can mostly bypass the wholesalers that many college bookstores use to obtain used books, instead shipping used books between the company’s different franchises around the country.

“The network of stores allows us to have our own virtual wholesale network,” Keating said.

The wholesalers used by textbook stores such as KU Bookstores buy used books from bookstores and sell them to other stores at marked-up prices.

David Monk, co-founder of Beat The Bookstore, said that bypassing wholesalers allowed Beat The Bookstore franchises to keep prices lower than other college bookstores, which must factor wholesaler mark-ups into their prices.

“We offer the student the real market value for their book,” Monk said. “We don’t use the middleman, if you will.”

Beat The Bookstore’s network also allows each franchise to gauge a textbook’s value at universities across the country, instead of its value at just one school. Monk said this translates into higher buyback prices for students.

Monk said a student coming in for buyback might have an accounting book that won’t be used at the University of Kansas during the next semester, but will be used at the University of Texas. Beat The Bookstore would offer the student a higher buyback price than the wholesale price other bookstores would use, and then ship the book to its UT location.

Tim Norris, director of KU Bookstores, predicted that Beat The Bookstore might have trouble keeping stocked with all the textbooks students need. Norris said KU Bookstores made sure to carry books for every course, even graduate-level courses with very few students.

Keating agreed that Beat The Bookstore might not have the extensive selection of university-owned bookstores.

“We may not have everything, but what we do have will be a better deal,” he said.

Beat The Bookstore will also offer a store credit system where students can receive a slightly higher buyback price if they put their buyback money into an account with the store. Those students will not have to pay sales tax on that money when they use it to buy textbooks later.

Keating said the account was a popular option at the University of Georgia store where he worked for a week while preparing to open his franchise.

“They called it their ‘delayed gratification policy,’ ” he said.

Norris said KU Bookstores may partner with other campus bookstores around the country to form a network for bypassing wholesalers in the future.

KU Bookstores sells used books at 75 percent of their new retail prices, and it offers students 50 percent of the retail price for buybacks when a book will be used again the next semester. If no instructors will use the book the next semester, the student will receive the highest buyback price offered by one of the major textbook wholesale companies.

Kansan staff writer Matt Erickson can be contacted at merickson@kansan.com.

— Edited by Trevan McGee

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