Today’s issue of Shelf Awareness shared some new information from two separate studies.

• 91% of students living on-campus go online every day.
• Price or word of mouth recommendation encourage students to visit a website most.
• Students purchase about 16% of their textbooks online.
• When purchasing online 74% do it from an online store, 31% from the college bookstore’s site, and 5% from a student-created site.

The statistics generally follow those we’ve quoted here. If you take 74 percent of the 16 percent of books bought online, you get 11.84 percent of college textbooks being purchased from a store similar to those where we sell our books.

For some time, we have witnessed the flop house-esqe nature of Starbucks: one person sprawled across the biggest table, using three chairs, and talking on his or her cell phone. Over the past year, I have noticed the same thing occurring at Barnes and Noble and other chain bookstores. Given the dearth of Starbucks-esqe seating, however, people flop wherever they can, including the floor. The New York Times printed a great article yesterday discussing this new and disturbing trend and alludes to how it effects independents as well. What makes this trend altogether much more disturbing than Starbucks is that it impedes the natural aim of a bookstore: to sell books. Perhaps, it will begin pushing more customers to buy online….

Laud the Abebooks marketing team one day (see our Abe’s Marketing Department Scores Big post), scathe them the next. That’s the spirit around here it seems. It is hard to avoid, however, after receiving a copy of Abebooks’ most recent press release with today’s news leads. Scarred by typos and and an awkward lead sentence (did they miss the first day of Marketing 101?), Abe’s attempt to piggyback on the recent GAO report does not improve from there. The example book (to delineate its point about saving money by buying books online) to be quite honest, doesn’t impress me as a bookseller or a consumer. In fact, the $89 price quoted by Abe’s own PR hardly compares to a copy on Amazon right now offered by lear732000 for $69.99 (which will no doubt be gone soon). Now that $69.99 is a good price, nice… half off… perfect. Finally, Abe, don’t come at me with all this American students mumbo jumbo, hooray, hooray for the disdain and then so proudly declare the fact that you are a foreign company, mentioning offices across the globe…. except in the US. Now, with all that said and soap box discarded, we cannot fault them in their goal of increasing online booksales among college students. For this, ALL online booksellers should be thankful.