How and Where Students are Acquiring Their Textbooks.

Students from Kalamazoo College purchase their textbooks from a few different sources. They either purchase them from the Kalamazoo College bookstore (22%), from an online source (39%), or a combination of both (39%). But students also rent their textbooks from online sources. 16.7% of the students surveyed only rented their books online, 36.1% of the students both rented and purchased their books, and 47.2% of the students only purchased their books.

Only 20% of the students who purchased their textbooks said that they did not sell them back while 69% sold them back to the Kalamazoo College Bookstore while the remaining 11% sold them back online. Also, overall as the number of books purchased went up so did the overall price paid for renting or purchasing. But as the number of books purchased went up the price for the most expensive book purchased went down. We looked at the overall GPA of the students and in general the more money the students spent on books the lower their GPA was. So it could be that potentially students learn better from the cheaper text books.