Behind the scenes of HutchCC’s book buyback

By Pablo Sanchez
Campus Editor

It can be a pain when it comes to book buyback, so let’s take a dive into why students get less money and have to pay for more for the books that they need in order to get the most our of their class.

Hutchinson Community College Campus Store manger Amber Crick gives an answer.

“For buyback, we hire a company out of Nebraska to come in and do they buy,” she said.” They are the ones that give the students cash for their books. They are a wholesale book company and buy back textbooks for schools all over the country.

“Per the buyback bookmark that we hand out to students at the time they purchase their books the wholesale company will pay up to 50 percent of the used purchase price of a book, but the buy back price varies depending on each title.”

Crick said the buyback company can’t guarantee it will buy a student’s book.

“ We don’t receive their buyback information until about two weeks prior to the scheduled buyback,” Crick said.

“They come in with their computers and their systems and buy textbooks back for themselves. We give them a list of textbooks and the quantities that we need and they buy back those particular books for the store.”

Crick said only certain quantities of books are bought back based on enrollment numbers for the subsequent term.

“We do not set any buyback prices,” Crick said. “The buyback is a service that the Campus Store offers to students so that they can recoup some of the money they spent on their textbooks. It also helps the bookstore to have used books available on the shelves for the following semester and helps to keep our used book prices down.”

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