WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A first-of-its-kind partnership, with Purdue University bringing Amazon to campus as its preferred textbook provider in 2014, quietly has been scaled back in recent weeks.
The West Lafayette campus and Amazon are still partners, Purdue’s top purchasing official told the J&C Friday. But as professors found in the past week, unable to upload the fall 2018 semester’s titles and course materials into an Amazon textbook portal that has been standard fare for the past four school years, the online giant no longer will be Purdue’s favored seller of textbooks.
The move will not affect the two Amazon@Purdue ordering and pick-up stores in the Purdue Memorial Union and the Krach Leadership Center on Third Street, which will remain open.
Rob Wynkoop, Purdue’s managing director of service enterprises, said Amazon initiated the change as it negotiated an extension of the relationship with the university through July 2023. He said Amazon will continue to sell textbooks – offering more than 90 percent of the adopted titles on campus each semester – and keep its campus stores.
But why Amazon wanted out of the preferred textbook provider arrangement, Wynkoop said he wasn’t sure.
Amazon officials did not immediately respond to messages left Friday.
First announced in August 2014, and rolled out in full in early 2015, the preferred textbook partnership between Purdue and Amazon was the first of its kind. A Purdue committee spent a year before settling on Amazon, saying at the time that the agreement would give students an opportunity to save 30 percent on class materials that, at the time, averaged $1,200 a year.
The Amazon deal was touted as a key component in President Mitch Daniels’ student affordability portfolio, often hailed in the national press right after discussions of the fact that Purdue’s tuition has been flat-lined, with no increases since the former Indiana governor arrived on campus in January 2013.
“This new way of doing business has the potential to change the book-buying landscape for students and their families,” Daniels said in August 2014.
Students weren’t forced to buy textbooks from Amazon. But the university made it easy, from ordering to pick-up, leaving traditional, off-campus textbook sellers – including long-time stalwarts University Bookstore and Follett’s – to scramble.
Wynkoop said that since 2015, the deal provided $2.2 million in direct savings on textbooks. Purdue reaped $2 million from Amazon, which was folded back into scholarships and efforts to keep the tuition freeze – now going into its sixth consecutive year, with the promise of a seventh year to follow.
The change apparently was quiet enough that it has been causing some book ordering confusion, particularly after last weekend’s graduation ceremonies, as professors and department heads looked to get courses squared away before the summer break.
Frank Dooley, a senior vice provost who was on the committee that recommended Amazon in 2014, said his office was still trying on Friday to understand how things worked.
According to an email from the Purdue registrar’s office, obtained by the J&C, professors and department textbook managers were being guided to a new textbook management site built and maintained by the university, instead of by Amazon. (Amazon’s textbook portal at Purdue will work for courses through the summer 2018 semester, but it will disappear after that.) The email said lists generated from the university’s site would be shared with University Bookstore and Follett’s.
What the new deal will mean for off-campus textbook retailers – some of whom have groused about being shoved off campus by Amazon’s official bookstore status at Purdue – wasn’t clear late in the week.
A representative from University Bookstore, directly across from campus at the corner of State and Grant streets, said the store was aware of the changes in Purdue’s deal with Amazon but wasn’t going to comment at the moment. Attempts to contact managers at Follett’s Bookstore weren’t immediately successful Friday.
John von Erdmannsdorf, owner of Von’s Bookstore at 315 W. State St., said his store has done progressively fewer textbook sales through the years. But he said his shop had felt the effect of Purdue’s relationship with Amazon.
The Amazon pick-up point on the first floor of the Purdue Memorial Union was open but fairly quiet Friday morning.
Wynkoop said that since 2015, 530,000 packages have been delivered to the pick-up points in the Union or at Krach Leadership Center. At the start of each semester, he said, the top 50 sellers were always textbooks. After that?
He said keeping Amazon on campus still makes sense, even if the Seattle-based company steps back from the textbook deal that was the first of its kind.