Pierce to Lease Books to Students

WOODLAND HILLS —  With new textbooks costing as much as $70 each, Pierce College will launch a pilot book-leasing program beginning in January designed to ease students’ financial burden, officials said Tuesday.

The BookLease program apparently would be the first on a California college campus, Pierce officials said.

“The big issue here, and at every other college, is that the price of books has gotten so high that a full-time student can easily spend $300 to $500 every semester,” Pierce President Rocky Young said. “Books are starting to overshadow the cost of tuition.”

Students would be able to lease a new $70 textbook for $45 per semester, said Pierce bookstore manager Larry Kraus, with the book’s lease price dropping to $34 in subsequent semesters.

Students would in effect pay for the depreciation of the book, Kraus said, and a leased book could turn a profit for the bookstore by its third semester of use.

Officials could not say how many of the 13,900 students might be able to participate in the program right away.

Lease programs have run into opposition elsewhere from instructors who say that repeat-use requirements tend to limit academic freedom. Officials said such opposition had not become an issue at Pierce.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Helen Krahn, the president of the Faculty Senate. “Really, textbooks have become so expensive. This morning one young lady told me she paid over $500 for her textbooks.”

Krahn said most Pierce teachers already use the same text repeatedly in order to allow students to purchase used copies and keep costs down. Young said that instructors who wish to switch books more frequently could opt out of the leasing program.

Karl Pohrt, an American Booksellers Assn. board member and owner of a bookshop catering to University of Michigan students in Ann Arbor, said Pierce’s plan is interesting but unnecessary.

“I don’t think textbook prices have made any large jump in the last couple of years,” he said. “The publishing industry isn’t necessarily gouging people with their prices, either.”

Besides, students have resold their used textbooks for years, Pohrt said, generating almost the same savings the Pierce book-leasing program would create.

“If somebody buys a book from me for $10, and it’s going to be used again, they can sell that book back for $5,” Pohrt said. “So this whole rental thing doesn’t sound like such a super deal.”

Calls to major publishers Tuesday afternoon were not immediately returned.

Although textbook leasing isn’t new, Kraus said he has found only a handful of similar leasing programs around the nation.

One of the oldest is at the University of Wisconsin’s Whitewater satellite campus. According to bookstore manager Terri Meinel, the campus has been leasing books since it was established in 1868.

Students pay only $45 a semester to lease all the books they will use during the semester.

“They get about $250 to $300 worth of books,” Meinel said. “If they don’t return the books at the end of the semester we’ll bill them for the retail price.”

At Pierce, Kraus said, students will give the bookstore a credit card deposit for any books they lease.

An advantage to leasing rather than buying a used book comes in the price, said Tom Aduwo, assistant bookstore manager at Pierce. Students save about 10% by leasing rather than buying a used book, he said.