Tis the season to sell back your textbooks. With the end of the semester and the holidays near, the cash received by selling back books can lift the spirits.

Students have a few options when selling back books.

The OCCC Bookstore and Textbook Brokers, located at 7445 South May Ave., will be open for extended hours during the last weeks of the semester.

And as many students are aware, selling books online is becoming a popular, fast and easy way to get rid of those unwanted books.

Jessica Pursell, pre-education major, comments on buying and selling books.

“Usually online books are cheaper, I use the bookstore as the last resort,” Pursell said.

“Textbook Brokers, from what I’ve experienced are not a lot cheaper, but they are a bit.

“Depending on the subject, I’ll generally sell them back, but in case I have to use it again or if it’s a subject that interests me I’ll keep the book,” she said.

OCCC Bookstore director, Brenda Reinke, has other opinions of online book buying and selling.

“I’ve looked at the prices online and we’re pretty competitive to what people buy them back online for.

“I strongly suggest students sell their books here because they’re helping out students locally. It helps out the students and 100 percent of the revenue goes right to this campus,” she said.

“In order to get the full value normally of what buy back would be worth, we do it Dec. 12-19 which is the last week of classes,” Reinke said.

Throughout the semester students can sell books back, but sometimes they will only receive the wholesale value back, according to Reinke.

“Usually during regular book buy back, you can get up to 50 percent of your money back, but if its not regular time we got by whatever the national value is,” Reinke said.

Reinke does not know why textbooks lose so much of their value.

“We take a risk, we buy the books back and we sell them back to the students, sometimes we sell all of our books and sometimes we don’t and the ones we don’t sell we lose money on them.

“That’s probably just a fair margin to where if we have any losses it’s not such a huge loss,” she said.

Logan Taylor, an OCCC student and Textbook Brokers employee, said they buy back books all year.

“But it would probably be more beneficial to wait until the end of the semesters to receive a substantial amount back,” Taylor said because books have a higher value at different times.

Textbook Brokers displays they have cheaper books than OCCC’s bookstore.

Logan said Textbook Brokers also buys back more books than OCCC.

“It varies on if they are custom books, but a student will normally walk out of here with more money because we accept more books.”

By buying back books at either OCCC’s Bookstore or Textbook Brokers, students are guaranteed cash back.

“We give cash back for books because it wouldn’t be beneficial if we gave out vouchers,” Logan said.

Reinke said the same, “We’ve considered doing gift cards and loyalty cards, but we have not moved to that.

“We’ve found that most students like to have the cash that way their options are open. But it wouldn’t make the students happy, they should have the option as to where they want to buy and sell their books.”

To contact Sarah Hussain, email staffwriter3@occc.edu.