The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

International Affair

Quickly-moving information on the Internet is responsible for alerting students to the phenomenon and has given them greater access to the bargains.

A 1998 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which determined that books published in the United States and sold to foreign markets could be resold to U.S. consumers without penalty, is another contributor to the rising popularity of shopping overseas.

The considerable price differences, however, should merit alarm, said Laura Nakoneczny, a spokesperson for the National Association of College Stores.

“Our concern is the discriminatory pricing,” Nakoneczny said. “Book companies sell cheaper (to) overseas than to domestic (textbook providers). This isn’t fair to the students.”

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Student costs for books and supplies are also rising, providing more incentive to search for better textbook deals online. Books and supplies cost students $727 to $807 for the 2002-03 school year, while the previous year’s costs were $693 to $765, according to a report by The College Board.

Despite high book prices, some Marquette students would not risk buying cheaper books online.

“It would be too much effort (to search for deals online),” said sophomore Alex Hermanny. “Also, some of my friends had trouble getting books online from Amazon.com.”

Freshman Sarah Wolff paid nearly $600 for her first-semester books, but recognized that some of the cost is justified.

“Some books can be used for next semester,” Wolff said, specifically citing her chemistry book.

Campus purveyors are also choosing not to import books from abroad.

“I’m aware of the opportunity to find alternative sources for textbooks,” said Ed Sweeney, owner of Sweeney’s College Books, 1634 W. Wisconsin Ave. “But I don’t use (foreign sources) to acquire books.”

“I wouldn’t recommend buying books online,” he said, because of the students’ inability to return the books and the unpredictability of shipping from foreign locations.

Marquette students will likely have mixed results when searching for foreign book deals online.

BookCentral.com, one of the Web sites that offers book sales from foreign markets, offered few of the texts required for Marquette classes.

“The number of U.S. textbooks that are available and accessible in the quantities required by Follett stores is very limited,” said Cliff Ewert, the vice president of marketing and campus relations at the Follett Higher Education Group. “It is estimated that even with maximum effort, less than 2 percent of our total textbook needs could be sourced overseas.”

When comparing BookCentral.com to BookMarq’s list of medical textbooks, for example, exact matches were rarely found — nearly all the books offered by Marquette were not available on BookCentral.com, or they were the wrong edition.

One book, Aiello’s “Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy,” was cheaper. The BookCentral.com price was $99.09, less than half than Marquette’s $204.95 charge.

Another book, however, actually cost less when offered by Marquette than by BookCentral.com. Randall’s “Palliative Care Ethics” cost $39.95 on the Marquette Web site, compared with $66.69 from BookCentral.com.

At Amazon.co.uk, the Amazon site that caters to students in the United Kingdom, sells “Advanced Modular Mathematics: Pure Mathematics 2” for about $14. It is sold in the United States for about $34.

“Importing books of any type from overseas is at best an imperfect process,” Ewert said.