Empty shelves line the campus store after the University of St. Thomas did away with its physical book sales at the end of the fall semester. The new digital storefront has been met with mixed reactions by the campus community. (Kevin Lynch/The Crest) 
Book orders made through the new system run by Barnes & Noble College are stored in the space previously occupied by textbooks. (Kevin Lynch/The Crest) 
Campus store coordinator Anika Barland said that part of the reason BNC was chosen as the new book seller was because other third party companies would have sought to run the entire campus store, potentially putting student workers out of the job. (Kevin Lynch/The Crest)
The St. Thomas campus store stopped its in-store textbook sales at the end of the fall semester, implementing an online-only model run by Barnes & Noble College that supplies students with course materials directly through a digital bookstore.
Store coordinator Anika Barland said the change came out of necessity, as Willo Labs, the store’s previous book supplier, announced that it would no longer service independent campus bookstores like St. Thomas’ at the end of 2024.
“This is kind of the way that most bookstores have been going towards,” Barland said. “We’re actually one of the last colleges to adopt this process.”
The change has been met with criticism by some faculty and students.
Junior chemistry major Preity Persaud said she needed to purchase five books this semester — three of which she bought digitally through the bookstore and two she found for cheaper on Amazon. However, when looking through the required books listed for her on St. Thomas’ site, some flaws emerged.
“I think it’s kind of logical to make the distinction that in my instrumental analysis, I won’t be needing to read a book about the Islamic language,” Persaud said.
She said the problems were remedied when her professors sent out emails clarifying the error in the system. At the same time, she was told by many professors that they needed to change their course materials because older books were not available through BNC.
Associate English professor Sal Pane said he was disappointed to find that the only book he required students to purchase this semester, “Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir” by Paul Rousseau, was not available to order physically through BNC.
“I can see it all over the Cities; it’s in Barnes & Noble,” Pane said. “So I was a little taken aback that they didn’t have any physical copies.”
Store assistant manager Sue Zuehlsdorff said that she is aware of some of the issues that have occurred thus far and hopes to better integrate the system going forward. She and Barland said that the system — which is also employed by nearby institutions like Concordia University-St. Paul, Macalester College and St. Catherine University — will ultimately streamline many aspects of book-buying for students and faculty.
“Everybody’s still learning — between us, BNC learning our systems and what we like and how we want to run things, the professors, the students — so, of course, there’s going to be bumps in the road because we’re figuring it out, but it’s going good, and it’s going to be great,” Zuehlsdorff said.
For example, Zuehlsdorff said, the site features a guaranteed buyback rate under each book — something that was not always a given in the past.
“You know when you’re going in: ‘OK, does it make more sense for me to buy it because I can sell it back for this amount, or do I rent it and save the money and then just be done with it when it’s over?’ and we didn’t have that option before,” Zuehlsdorff said.
For faculty, Barland said that BNC’s catalog of 11 million titles will make pairing textbooks with classes easier and that instructors’ usually clunky process of ordering repeat titles from semester to semester will be “as simple as one click.”
The store’s shelves, previously crammed with textbooks, now serve as a way to sort student orders that come in through BNC. Barland said that management is still undecided as to whether the space will continue to be used for storage or repurpose it further.
Barland said that a desire to protect student jobs was one potential reason the university avoided using a seller that would manage the entirety of the campus store. The university may not have been able to guarantee that the third party would hire back the same workers, she said, and a company like BNC that managed the bookstore and not the entire space would allow the store to continue selling merchandise and supplies as normal.
“With the transition from DIII to DI, there’s a huge opportunity for growing the stores,” Barland said. “There’s also more considerations with licensing our goods; having the St. Thomas logo has become much more important.”
Zuehlsdorff said that there are no plans to cut student jobs due to the change and that the new system will eliminate the need for staff to stay late pulling book orders or checking inventory now that the new system handles such functions.
“We’d have 200 to 300 orders a day that we would be pulling the books that we just shelved; we’d be pulling them to fulfill these orders,” Zuehlsdorff said. “This takes that part out of it for us.”
Mail Coordinator Doug Brown said that under the new system, the mailroom’s only responsibility is to process and shelve students’ orders.
“Our hands aren’t touching the product as much, because Barnes & Noble is handling the majority of the items,” Brown said. “ … So it’s hard to really say, because we really haven’t had any pitfalls, other than the human factor of making sure we get the right packages to the right person.”
Pane said that while he understands the economic difficulty of running a campus bookstore, he will miss the opportunities afforded by physical book sales.
“I think it’s a great place for students to just go and just be able to buy books and just be able to browse titles,” Pane said. “ … So I think both models are useful, but it would be great if you had both.”
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.
