By Autumn Salvesen
autumn@newsroom.byu.edu
The line is circling around the shelves; students are carrying baskets full of books and hoping they can sell them back at the end of yet another semester.
Brent Laker, assistant director of books at the bookstore, said the bookstore is ready to sell books for Fall semester.
'There are a lot of us who spend our life here at the bookstore getting ready for the next semester,' Laker said.
To get ready for the Fall book rush, approximately 46 cash registers are set up and 75-80 people are needed to manage the cash registers, Laker said.
He also said that the shelves have to be set up, which requires eight to 10 people working for three or four days.
After that is done, the books need to be moved onto the shelves.
It takes a lot of work to move the books out on the shelves, but what about all the work that goes into ordering the books?
The process starts in March when the faculty is required to have in their lists for their continuing books, Laker said.
That is when the Text Book department takes over and starts evaluation process.
'Every title has to be looked at separately,' Laker said. 'We look at two things, how many students will be needing the book and how many books we have. If we do not have enough we send someone to go out and search for them.'
Last Fall semester, the bookstore provided approximately 258,301 books and sold around 224,962, Laker said.
'We looked at 3,782 titles last fall,' Laker said. 'All of this has to be done as we are looking at different information from each semester.'
Laker said that after they get the book orders, they look at the history of the book, how they think it will sell and the future of the book.
'Depending on what is found, we change each semester,' Laker said.
Laker gave the Biology 100 book as an example. He said that they might sell around 2,000 books for fall whereas they will only sell 900 books in the winter semester.
As a result, the bookstore is only able to buy back 900 books, Laker said.
'The reason for this is because a lot of selling by students, which we support, is done, and so we need to make adjustments each semester,' Laker said.
'Generally, the buyback is not affected between Fall and Winter semesters,' Laker said.
'Even though students don't believe us, we provide the biggest buyback in the country,' Laker said.
The bookstore buys back books at 60 percent of what it cost the student, Laker said.
The amount can be good considering the average cost of a hardback book is $65.18 and the average cost of a paperback is $14.63, Laker said.
David Christianson, 21, a sophomore with an open major from Salt Lake City, said that he just likes to borrow books from his friends.
Some advice from eHow.com on how to find cheap textbooks suggested finding out early what books will be needed and asking people if they have them.
It also said to check out a lot of bookstores including online bookstores.
The last bit of advice it gives is to be patient and to not expect to find all your books in one place.