Price Competition for Textbooks - online stores offer better deal, but don't always have everything - Brief Article

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, August, 1999 by Stephanie Gallagher

College bookstores no longer have a monopoly on the market.

Another blessing of technology: Thanks to the Internet, college bookstores are facing increased competition. Online stores are enticing students with price cuts, low (and sometimes no) shipping charges, and an impressive inventory of used books. Best of all: The virtual stores are often forcing price cuts at the real ones.

To test where students can find the best deals, we compared the prices of books for four courses at Stanford University--Economics 050, Art 121B, Biology 129 and Biology 213--among the campus bookstore and four online rivals.

The verdict: You can often get a better deal online, but you won't always find everything you need. While online stores such as MellyC (www.mellyc.com) and Textbooks .com (www.textbooks.com) boast great prices, selection is limited. MellyC had only two of the eight books we searched for. One was substantially cheaper--$63 versus $85.50 (before tax) at the campus bookstore--but the other was the same price, $99. Because sales tax at Stanford is high--8.25%--and MellyC doesn't charge tax or shipping, it would be a better deal to buy both of the books at MellyC.

VarsityBooks.com (www.varsitybooks .com) offers a good selection if your school is among those it covers. With shipping, you'd pay $119.26 for books for Art 121 (Modernism and Abstraction) and Biology 129 (Cellular Dynamics) at Varsity, about $30 less than at Stanford's bookstore.

If you're interested in used books and a potential source of great savings, check out eFollett (www .efollett.com). It operates 600 on-campus bookstores and offers a huge inventory of used books online. If you buy online, you should receive your books within three to seven days.

--STEPHANIE GALLAGHER