When I first heard that Amazon would be partnering with UMass to bring textbooks to campus, I was excited. I shop on Amazon for everything and as soon as the company launched Amazon Prime, I signed up because I wanted two day shipping all the time. I thought that this would be a match made in heaven, but as I’ve grown to know more of what happens on the other side, I’ve grown weary to think that this is a perfect partnership.
When Amazon at UMass was launched, there were a lot of promises made. Amazon promised UMass students speedy delivery times and affordable books. However when you look at the Amazon site, you are not able to purchase the cheapest option of the book you are looking for. Most of the time, the book available to Amazon prime delivery was a used version that cost almost as much as a brand new copy. As an English major who has to order several different textbooks for nearly all of my classes, this was disappointing to me. A book that I could’ve ordered used from another Amazon retailer for $3 is being offered to me for $25.
In terms of delivery times, Amazon offered students free 1 day and 2 day shipping. However they neglected to put the infrastructure in place to be able to handle so many deliveries. While the pick up location in the campus center was an added bonus, many students elected to have their books delivered to their dorms, which inundated the Residential Service Desks and the student employees with bags and bags of packages to handle and log in a timely manner. As a Customer Service Associate for the residential service desks, I can attest to the fact that each day during the add drop period we received close to 900 packages nearly every single day, three times more than what the desks normally handle.
Students are not the only one’s frustrated with the system. There have been professors who were told at the last minute that a book for their course is not available, forcing them to reconfigure their syllabus right at the start of the semester. Books that are marked available to students are actually not even shipped for weeks, leaving students behind and unable to complete course readings.
When Food For Thought bookstore closed on 2014, I was a little devastated. As a book lover, I much prefer to wander around a bookstore and find something that interests me than to just order something offline. Nothing beats the feeling of a book in your hand and to smell the pages as you cracked it open for the first time. This was an experience that ordering off of Amazon and Barnes and Nobles could never give me. However, I hate to admit, I never ordered my academic textbooks from Food for Thought. What I failed to realize at the time is how much the local bookstores depend on textbook sales.
Amazon has taken UMass by storm, but it seems to be at the expense of the students and of the local community. Students are not saving as much money as they thought they would. Local bookstores are closing and leaving the community without a choice of bookstore for residents. If Amazon wants to be successful, they should partner with the professors and the community to come up with something that works well for both. They should put the people they are working with ahead of the profit they are making in order to have a perfect partnership.