Furthermore, it's easy to forget just how hard it could be to track down even an in-print book and how long it could take to actually get your hands on it. Some big city bookstores were better but, in many cases, (assuming the bookstore would special order books at all), it would basically be put into the next batch order from a publisher which might be a month or two.
Above reasons contributed to quite a bit of the books not getting sold.
But yeah, I had to uncrate the dang books, and a few weeks later, crate the same books to ship back to publishers.
I bet I'm one of the very few of the student body who learned how to work with Pallet trucks.
The crazy thing was, once the semester was nearing the end, we'd pack up all the unsold books (some classes had many unsold books) and ship them back to the publisher, at a significant loss from what I remember.
The student union was run independently from the university as a non-profit and was running a big deficit. However, the office people upstairs had humongous 24 inch CRT monitors, ones that surely cost a pretty penny. In 1998, 17 inch CRT sold for nearly a thousand dollars. I just looked it up. But I digress.
Huh?