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Comment by filmgirlcw | Hacker News Reader

Yup -- I remember in college (in the early 2000s) how slow it could be for a bookstore to get a book in that a professor required for class (there was a book of poetry I literally could not find in the state of Georgia and my professor let me photocopy the work she had assigned until I could get my copy from Amazon b/c she recognized that I had literally called every single major and minor bookseller in Atlanta and the publisher and none could get me a delivery time ahead of Amazon, which was still going to be after our test) and by the time I graduated, most of us just reflexively went to Amazon rather than trying to fight over 6 copies Barnes & Noble or the college bookstores would manage to get in.

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That reminds me of the time I worked in the stock room of student book store in a major university on the west coast of US in mid 1990s. The stock room was in the basement of the school student bookstore. Before and beginning of each semester, we'd get crates of books, books that only college student taking a class would be required to buy.

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.

> In 1998, 17 inch CRT sold for nearly a thousand dollars.

Huh?

Which brings an unrelated point of how much understanding a typical university professor has for the idea that their course may not be the be-all-and-end-all of student's life. Making an unavailable book a requirement for a course? Ahh how much I don't miss those days of being at the mercy of every university prof or bureaucrat's whims :-)

Some profs just over ordered books. Some students bought books from other privately owned book stores across the street. Some students dropped out of class and hence did not buy books that were needed for 2nd half of the semester.

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.

I rarely bought books until I attended the first few classes. Some classes had books on the list that were never even used. Literature professors were the worst: hey go buy this book for 20-40 dollars, you will need to read about 10 pages of it.

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