Textbook Requests

There are plenty of reasons to work with us - we make the ordering process as smooth as possible for you. More than that, choosing the bookstore, even when your books are available elsewhere, benefits your students.

Students using financial aid programs  or student sponsorships rely on booklists submitted through the bookstore to access their materials. All students use our textbook lookup tool to understand what they need for the semester all in one place, even if they end up purchasing elsewhere. We need your help to keep accurate book lists!

We set our adoption deadlines with them in mind, including enough lead time to account for longer shipping times. Submitting your orders by the deadline each semester makes sure all students aren't left behind, and we have enough time to handle any hurdles that come up in the process.

Many people wonder why our timelines are set so early. Our goal is to ensure that we have the books for your class start date at the lowest possible price. Here are some of the ways that meeting the Bookstore's timelines helps you, your students, the Bookstore, and the college.

• By combining orders from the same publisher we can reduce freight costs and pass those savings along to the students.
• We ensure there is enough time for the publisher to print and ship the ever increasing number of print on demand books. For some publishers, this is now 100% of their titles. The lead time on these books can be 4-6+ weeks.
• Gives us time to work together if there are problems with your book requests such as; it is no longer in print, it has gone to a new edition, or it is import to order and may take 8-10+ weeks to arrive.
• On-time textbook requests also guide our decisions on which books to return to publishers from previous semesters and which to keep. This saves considerable shipping costs as we may have just returned the books that you need for your courses.

An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number - each time something is changed in a book it also changes. When a book is part of a package with a digital resource, or another book the package gets its own unique ISBN. So if you provide us with an ISBN you have for an old edition of a book, or a book that you actually want as a package, we don't have a way to know that.

Unfortunately, no. As you might imagine, books are very expensive to ship. Air freight or express ground is extraordinarily expensive and the bookstore cannot absorb the cost to rush books in for late requests.

The reality is that the not all students will purchase their texbooks from the booksoter. They will either decide not to purchase their books or buy them from an alternate source. Like all departments at the college, the Bookstore is required to make sound financial decisions. So, we base our buying decisions for each book in each class on the following:

• Sales in previous terms for the course.
• Whether the book is required or not.
• How long the book has been in circulation.
• The price of the book, and whether other retailers can offer it at a better price than we can.
• Whether there are other editions the students can use.
• Whether the library offers a copy on reserve or a free digital version are avaialable
• Whether we can return unsold books or not
• Any additional information you can give us to help us make better buying decisions. 

That's a great question! As academic staff, I am sure you can appreciate the time and effort that goes into creating high quality course materials. The publishers set their prices and the Bookstore works with the cost and retail prices that the publishers have set. Despite the high price of many textbooks, there is actually very little margin on textbooks, the Bookstore doesn't over inflate prices or seek to profit from textbook sales.

Our definitions are:

• Required books are needed to pass the class. These are the books your students really can't do without.
• Recommended books help students excel in the class.
• Optional books are supplemental. They enhance your students' understanding of the topics covered, or that they may find interesting.
• Alternate books are often previous editions of books, or books students can use in the place of required or recommended books.

Not all textbooks come as eBooks, but more and more do. If you'd like your students to have an option to use the eBook, please let us know when you place your textbook request and we will do our best to track down an option for them. Sometimes the digital book comes as part of a learning platform, and you (as the instructor) may have to set up your course code in that platform in order for your students to access their books. This is usually a very straightforward process. Please also know, that often digital offerings of textbooks are not offered in a standard pdf or eBook platform, but online as webpages in the publisher's elearning platform, and more and more of these platforms operate on a 4, 6, or 12 month subscription basis where the students lose access to their materials after that time frame.

The short answer is NO! Without appropriate permissions this breaks copyright rules. However, sometimes it is possible to get permission to do this. Please contact the NBCC Copyright Office to see if this might be possible.