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| The Middlebury College bookstore, when its shelves held textbooks. Photo: Hope Allison, The Middlebury Campus |
The Middlebury College bookstore doesn't look much like a bookstore anymore. The textbooks that once lined its shelves were cleared out earlier this year, making room for more Middlebury-branded sweatshirts, T-shirts and coffee mugs.
The bookstore, like many others at colleges across the country, had suffered from declining sales and stiff competition from large online retailers such as Amazon.
Bookstore manager Erin Jones-Poppe said it simply didn’t make sense for the store to keep stocking books.
"We cannot afford to continue in our current trajectory," she told the student newspaper, The Middlebury Campus, in 2017.
Last spring the bookstore switched to an online-only book ordering system, offered through MBS Textbook Exchange -- a company that was acquired by Barnes and Noble Education in 2017. Under the new system, students can still pick up their books from the bookstore -- they just have to order them online first. The system is supposed to provide better value for students. But faculty members at Middlebury say they want the old system back.
In a letter to the college administration, published in The Middlebury Campus on Oct. 11, faculty from the English and American literature and theater departments and 12 individual faculty members from other disciplines said the new online system had “a significant negative pedagogical impact.”...
Middlebury College is not alone in eliminating books from its bookstore in recent years.
Robert Batyko, social media and digital manager of the National Association of College Stores, said a few hundred institutions have moved course material ordering and delivery online. Nearly all the others do some combination of both online and physical textbook ordering and delivery, he said.
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Source: Inside Higher Ed
