Members of the Brown community need to know about the deleterious consequences of outsourcing the Brown Bookstore to Barnes and Noble. In the first of two columns arguing against outsourcing, I want to share eight reasons why the University should not outsource the bookstore that I have arrived at from my experience working there:
1. Let's begin with something that's elementary but underappreciated. Brown occupies the best retail footprint on a top destination street in the region. If you Google Thayer Street, you'll find tour companies running coaches to southeastern New England that feature Thayer Street as a highlighted stop. The corner of Thayer and Angell streets is, for the time being, Brown geography. It's stupid to give it up to Leonard Riggio, owner of Barnes and Noble.
2. The bookstore is the default campus visitor center. Its employees can talk knowledgeably about Brown because they carry Brown IDs, go to Brown events, take staff development courses, use the Rockefeller and Orwig Music libraries, use the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center and are ordinarily rather fond of the place. (Just try talking about Harvard for any length of time in the Harvard Square Barnes and Noble and see how far you get.)
3. Brown students pay less for their textbooks now than they will if the University outsources the bookstore to Barnes and Noble. That sounds counterintuitive, but it's an industry fact, and here's why: Barnes and Noble takes a markup over list price to recover its margin on short-discount textbooks. In contrast, the bookstore stays close to list price.
4. The bookstore's advantage in used books is even greater. There's a trade organization called the National Organization of College Stores that issues annual rankings, and the bookstore is number one among selective universities in the percentage of discounted used books it sells. Every third textbook you buy at the bookstore is marked down 25 percent. Barnes and Noble can't touch that. Considering the lip service University Hall gives to reducing textbook prices, you'd think this alone would be a Barnes and Noble deal-breaker.
5. Brown faculty will see their syllabuses narrow if the University outsources to Barnes and Noble. We at the bookstore know this because professors who've taught at Barnes and Noble campuses tell us their stories. Barnes and Noble is often unaccommodating on hard-to-get titles, imported titles, non-returnable titles and the whole world of books that don't pay. At the University of Chicago, the humanities faculty has switched from Barnes and Noble to an independent store to get syllabus satisfaction.
6. How does the bookstore beat Barnes and Noble on syllabus breadth? Eighty-four years of experience is the short answer. There are three buyers here who secure textbooks, and among them they have 84 years' employment at the bookstore and very big Rolodexes. Because Brown's curriculum is so idiosyncratic, textbook buyers literally have to go to the ends of the earth to service it. Professors often sit with the buyers to provide obscure contact information. It's a safe prediction that Barnes and Noble's profit-oriented mentality would afffect many departments, including Portuguese and Hispanic studies, literary arts, comparative literature and history.
7. Barnes and Noble's profit-oriented mentality even affects the provision of information to students. Students who've transferred to Brown from Barnes and Noble campuses tell us their stories. Barnes and Noble often restricts student access to syllabi before the start of school and then discourages students from transcribing ISBN numbers while on Barnes and Noble premises. At the bookstore, one of our undergraduate employees worked for Barnes and Noble at her previous school and had the unpleasant job of transcription cop. She has described to us an entirely alien bookselling culture.
8. The textbook refund policy at Barnes and Noble is stingy compared to ours. At Harvard, students have three days to return a book, while students at Tufts and Boston universities only have two days. At the bookstore, the refund policy is 10 days, with sympathetic flexibility depending on your predicament.
It is clear that outsourcing the bookstore will reduce the quality of the bookstore's service to the community. Yet, there is even more to say in defense of keeping the bookstore independent. A forthcoming column will address outsourcing's potential effects on the bookstore's trade books department and the Campus Shop.
Peter Sprake '07 is a Brown Bookstore employee and invites you to check out savethebookstore.org for more information regarding the bookstore's and Barnes and Noble's business practices.
