Book to the future

Yuni Kim
News Editor
Student input may mean more than you think.
The rapidly developing textbook rental systems that are now in place at York University, Ryerson University and the University of Toronto have one thing in common: in order to encourage student use, they are using student feedback to develop a more accessible system.
According to York University Bookstore director Steven Glassman, complaints regarding the book rental system are rare.
The testing period, on the other hand, was a different story.
“When I first started to test the system, it was a nightmare,” he said. “But we got things sorted out, and it looked good.”
Glassman mentioned he even had textbooks shipped to his own home address during this period to ensure deliveries would be made to students promptly.
However, he says that the rental program is still in its infancy.
“These things go slowly, and double or triple each term. But the actual picture is that we’ve had about 270 rentals, which is nothing […] it’s less than one percent of the transactions that we’ve done since Dec. 15,” he said, noting the pilot program for York’s bookstore just launched in January 2011.
The rental system at the University of Toronto has proven itself over a short period of time.
“When we started our pilot on May 2010, we had six titles available to rent,” Chad Saunders, University of Toronto Press vice-president of retail, wrote to Excalibur. “In September it grew to 100, and for the January term we had over 550 titles available.”
Saunders wrote that student feedback was essential in developing the text rental system further and was ultimately the reason for the extensive expansion.
“In the beginning we offered the [rental] program online only, but the majority of students said they prefer to get the books in store so we added that option,” he said. “[The students] were happy with the changes we have made to the program […] we rented out 20 times more books in January than we did for the entire fall term.”
Although their bookstore rental program started a few months later than the University of Toronto’s, Ryerson’s program is slowly but surely expanding as well.
“We started our pilot rental program Sept. 2010,” said Ryerson University Bookstore associate director Kelly Abraham. “We are pleased with the outcome from the fall term, and we do have an in-house rental program for this term as well.”
Glassman says that as a campus bookstore, everyone is doing what they can to provide a variety of options for students.
“The positive is that we’ve got a vast number of titles to draw from at very, very good rental prices,” he said.
“We’re trying to offer as many options as possible and get as many used books as possible, not just from our own students, but from the U.S. and from other campuses as well.”