Textbook price-check tool met with doubt Education Cost-comparison website gets mixed early reviews

Mario Esquivel, 18, San Francisco State University sophomore, looks for a Biology textbook at the SFSU bookstore at San Francisco State University on Friday, August 24, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. Mario Esquivel, 18, San Francisco State University sophomore, looks for a Biology textbook at the SFSU bookstore at San Francisco State University on Friday, August 24, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Textbook price-check tool met with doubt 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

(08-25) 04:00 PDT San Francisco -- Campus bookstores dislike it, and even some college students are skeptical of the new effort by a former California lawmaker to help them save money on textbooks for hundreds of classes on nearly every campus from Alabama to the Yukon Territory.

It's a free price-check that lets students compare textbook prices and rentals, and buy from the source they like best.

The new online tool ( www.20mm.org/Textbook-Search.html) comes from former state Sen. Dean Florez, president of the 20 Million Minds Foundation in Sacramento, which lobbies for low-cost textbooks and is behind legislation, SB1052, to create a low-cost digital textbook library in California.

The idea seems a winner, with textbook prices rising 8 percent on average in just the past year - faster than the cost of food, clothing or even housing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But Richard Hershman of the National Association of College Stores, which generally approves of textbook price comparisons, calls Florez's site "misleading" because it excludes campus store rental and digital prices, which Hershman said "are as cheap or cheaper as other online sources they link to."

Not all students are wild about the price-check tool either because the site does not yet include Amazon, and it doesn't always compare the same editions.

Florez says his foundation is working on both issues.

"We expect to continually improve the site as we move forward by adding additional vendors, plus a new feature that takes the real-time price at any third-party site and features it as best price at that particular time and place," Florez said.

Checking out the site

Joe Fitzgerald, a junior at San Francisco State University, where classes start on Monday, test-drove the site this week.

He selected his state, school and course, Journalism 300. Without the need to press "enter," all three books required for his course popped up. So did their prices from six sources, including the campus bookstore and two rental sites.

The primary text for the course, "Writing and Reporting the News," by Jerry Lanson, cost $89.95 new from the campus bookstore and $67.50 used. Other prices were $50.37 from the used-book site AbeBooks.com, and $38.25 from Half.com. No digital version was available (they can be even more expensive), but rentals cost $28.99 from Chegg.com and $30.58 from BookRenter.

"This is a great way to compare prices, but Amazon is usually my first choice," Fitzgerald said. So he checked that site and found his book used for $36.95.

Renting from Chegg was cheapest, "but for an $8 difference, I'd rather own it," he said, noting that Amazon also has free shipping options for students.

He punched in another class, Journalism 222, and saw the required text, "When Words Collide," selling used for $81.50 at the campus store - and $7 at Half.com.

"No, shut up! That's crazy!" Fitzgerald said. "Well, I'm eating my own words, and I'll gladly eat them for a $7 textbook."

The problem, he quickly found out, was that the $7 book was the seventh edition. His professor required the eighth.

"I'll have to get on the grapevine" to see if the older edition might work for the class, he said.

He admitted to being a bit ticked off because it would have been easy to click on the "buy" button and get the wrong book.

"But it looks like this guy has his heart in the right place," Fitzgerald said of Florez. "I hate to put down anyone who's trying to do a good thing for students."

Other students ran into some other glitches - but generally supported the concept.

One expensive book

At Golden Gate University, a private school in downtown San Francisco, Marcus Tseng dropped $297 on a single textbook at the campus bookstore Friday, "Survey of Accounting," by Carl S. Warren.

"It's killing me," he said. Told about the price-check website, Tseng said he would check it out as soon as he got home. It turned out that his school was among the few not included in the database.

Back at San Francisco State, Chukwuemeka Elendu, a freshman from Pleasanton, lugged a bag of six books for which he paid $473. The price-check site "seems neat, but it won't be as useful to me," Elendu said. "I don't have a credit card."

In the store, sophomore Mario Esquivel said he loved the idea of the price-comparison site - but would buy the new chemistry book he'd just selected anyway.

"It comes with online content," he said. But for other books, "I can cut down the time I spend online when I compare and contrast the price of books.

"It definitely sounds great."

This article has been corrected since it appeared in print editions.