Selling used college textbooks is a major segment of online bookselling. If you deal in used textbooks you may have noticed that a growing number of them proudly proclaim that they are made from “100% recycled materials”. Does this mean that the textbook industry is becoming “green”?
Hardly.
In reality Textbook publishers are among the least “green” in the book business. Their business model is predicated on churning out “new” editions of each book just about every year, resulting in massive amounts of waste.
Why does every textbook need a new edition every year? Has the Pythagorean Theorem changed since last year? What about the atomic weight of hydrogen? Did the bombing of Pearl Harbor happen on a different year than previously thought?
Of course not.
And yet textbook publishers roll out a batch of brand new editions each and every year.
The sad truth is that textbooks are a multi-billion dollar business dominated by only a handful of publishers. Those publishers pretty much have a stranglehold on the academic community.
As a result, textbooks, no matter how timeless their subject matter, have a maximum shelf life of about 2 yrs. Students trying to sell back used textbooks find that bookstores won’t buy back about 3/4 of their books.
This means that the manufacturing of textbooks requires the destruction of way more trees, and the use of way more fossil fuels than necessary. Any claims of the industry’s “effort” to be green is merely window dressing, a marketing ploy.
So how does this tie in to us as booksellers? Well, if you’re at all concerned about being “green” you can take pride in the fact that selling used textbooks puts a dent in the environmental impact of the worst offenders in publishing. Every time you buy back a text book, you’re helping to curb the rampant wastefulness of the textbook industry.
Bottom line: textbooks aren’t green, but reselling them is.
Tags: bookselling, green, textbooks
I would suggest using GreenTextbooks.org
Save Money, Save The Planet
GreenTextbooks.org specializes in the recycling of textbooks, DVDs, CDs. Buying used textbooks not only saves you money, but cuts down on greenhouse gases caused by the manufacturing of new textbooks.
With GreenTextbooks.org you’re not only saving trees, you are saving some green. http://www.GreenTextbooks.org