Many students went to buy and rent textbooks from Textbook Brokers only to find a sign that said the store was closed.
In recent years under new management, The Maverick Store has transitioned to Direct Digital with non-digital books being sold in the bookstore. Due to this approach, Textbook Brokers decided to move to a new campus.
“Our motto at [Textbook Brokers] was ‘students first.’ The problem now with no competition across the street, is that those ‘hidden’ materials’ cost can now be set at any price they want moving forward,” general manager for Textbook Brokers Marvin Lopez said.
Textbook Brokers had a system of buying a new book and renting it at a lower price, then renting it at the same price the next year. After that, the price gets lower every year until the new edition of that book comes out and the process starts over.
The main goal was to give students the lowest price on books and save them money.
“As for me, I’ve worked in the college textbook business for almost 10 years, at three different universities, one of which was the University of Arkansas with almost 40K students on campus,” Lopez said.
Lopez added that the national textbook market is vast and competitive and as each school takes its own approach, the national Textbook Brokers chain will keep their mission of giving students cheaper options.
With the store leaving Colorado Mesa University (CMU), students often have to rely on the school’s buying options. There are other buying options via Amazon– students can rent or buy a physical textbook from the site or on the Amazon Kindle app.
“It has been a weird semester because I loved going over to Textbook Brokers for the best deals and now they’re just gone,” sophomore Sports Management major Zach Surface said.
Avenues such as Facebook also allow students to buy and sell textbooks as needed.
Textbooks are important to any class and students need to have access to them to succeed in their studies, which creates the textbook market. A competitive market does exist, but it’s gotten much smaller for CMU students.
Though Textbook Brokers is closed as of now, there is not a definite answer of whether the store will return in future years.
