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PURCHASING TEXTBOOKS is an unsettling experience for most university and college students, one marked by long line-ups, daunting reading lists, 800-page introductory tomes -- and an enormous bill. Most first year students may never have bought a textbook while in high school, notes John Fleming, president of business and science publishing for Prentice Hall. "Suddenly there's the shock of having to buy a $70 accounting text. [They] say, 'What's wrong with this picture?'"
But while acquiring textbooks is disorienting at the best of times, this fall proved to be an especially confusing season, say college publishers and campus booksellers. Government cutbacks have led to an unprecedented number of course cancellations. Moreover, across the country, hundreds of professors and instructors this spring took advantage of early retirement packages offered by administrators struggling to trim budgets.
With schools scrambling to find replacement teachers, many textbook adoption decisions were made very late. And that meant college publishers had to scramble to fill orders coming in at the end of August. Oxford University Press, for instance, had to fly in stock from England at its own expense. Firms also struggled with the opposite dilemma: "We're seeing returns at unprecedented levels in August and September," says Diane Wood, president of John Wiley & Sons. "The patterns are completely out of whack. The cycle is later and shorter."
We've never seen a fall like this," agrees Chris Tabor, general manager of the Queens University campus bookstore. Among his biggest headaches in September: a meltdown at Canbook (see p. 1) that delayed the delivery of scores of titles, ranging from Penguin editions of Russian literature classics to a popular first year political science text.
My sympathy goes out to the text managers and the floor staff because they're the lightning rods for all this. Students come in, they're looking for their books. They want to get ahead, but the books aren't there. It's the front line staff who are feeling the venting of that frustration."
The upheaval at campus bookstores is merely a symptom of the massive changes sweeping through college publishing. Besides the repercussions from government cuts, the sector this year endured a remarkable number of corporate consolidations, as high-level takeovers led to the sale or closure of several Canadian...