Eastern students can purchase textbooks at a fraction of the cost they normally sell for at retail price at the Spring 2019 discarded textbook sale.

According to the College Board, students attending public four-year in- and out-of-state universities spend about $1,240 on books and supplies for 2018-2019.

The national average cost of a college textbook is $153, too, according to CBS, but textbooks are going for as little as 25 cents a pop at Eastern’s discarded textbook sale. That means students can pay as little as less than one percent for the normal cost of textbooks at the sale.

Staff clerk Christina Coffey said textbooks are going to be sold for $3, $1 and 25 cents for the sale.

She said the types of books in these three categories will vary, but ones in the 25-cent group will contain some books that were still remaining from last semester’s sale.

Psychology books, music books, kinesiology and English books are just a few students can expect to see, Coffey said.

There will also be a few fiction books available at the sale, she said. Among the fiction includes titles such as “Little Women,” “Call of the Wild” and “Island of the Blue Dolphin” that are left over from last semester’s sale, she said. There will also be anthologies—books with a collection of fiction stories, she said.

Textbooks get placed in the discarded textbook sale when they are no longer needed for a course, she said.

Each department at Eastern sends out a purchase request for new textbooks, and the chair of the departments must authorize which textbooks are getting discarded, Coffey said.

“Sometimes they get a new edition, sometimes the course content completely changes, so they discard the old books that no longer apply to that course,” she said.

The money that gets collected from the discarded textbook sales goes straight back into the budget to buy new textbooks for departments at Eastern, Coffey said.

Textbook Rental bids books that do not get sold to vendors, Coffey said, and they can go for as little as 75 cents to as much as $25 per book.

Coffey said students must bring their Panthercards to check out so that the clerks can write their E-numbers on the receipts, Coffey said. Students can pay with cash, check or credit card (Visa, MasterCard and Discover), according to Eastern’s website.

At the discarded textbook sales, Coffey said sometimes students end up purchasing a lot of textbooks—sometimes more than they originally anticipated. If students end up purchasing a large quantity, she said Textbook Rental has boxes for students to put the books in and take home with them.

This year’s Spring 2019 discarded textbook sale is ongoing all week, according to Eastern’s website. The discarded textbook sale’s hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The sale is located at Textbook Rental (the Louis M. Grado building) at 975 Edgar Drive.

Logan Raschke can be reached at 581-2812 or at lrraschke@eiu.edu.