If You’ve Had To Buy Books At A College Bookstore, You May Cheer When You Read This

From a consumer viewpoint, the Internet has a remarkable track record for changing the status quo regarding monopolies, oligopolies or business categories where there is a strong middleman component that adds to the final price of goods. There’s even a big word for it: disintermediation. According to this story at Business Week, disintermediation may be coming to a college bookstore near you.

Textbooks are a big expense item in a college education. This article at BankRate reports textbook costs have risen 40 percent over the last five years and can add $4,000 to the total cost of getting a degree. Many textbooks are now over $100 apiece. Often students have little choice, but to buy the required textbook from the one source that has it immediately available: the college bookstore. It is doubly frustrating for students because that book that was worth its weight in gold one semester, drops dramatically to its weight in coal the next semester when it’s time to resell or “trade it in.”

That’s about to change if companies like Chegg.com and others get their way. For students (and paying parents) this disintermediation probably can’t happen too soon. For college bookstores, it may mark the end of an era.