Visit any college dorm room in America and it becomes obvious: students don’t operate on a typical 9-5 schedule.

Instead, they’re active at all hours, and this impacts everything from when they eat to when they study and even how they shop for course materials for their classes. While most people shop online at 8pm on Monday, students may be in prime textbook buying mode at 5am on a Sunday, accommodating their social, work, and class schedule.

To help students easily find and choose the right course materials at any time, Akademos has implemented a number of customer support programs to make getting the right course materials easier and quicker than ever before.

There’s no better team member than Akademos’ Senior Customer Experience Manager, Ben Plunkett, who has been delivering stellar customer experiences for students since 2014, to explain the improvements he and his team have implemented, what it means for students, and how it helps universities support their students.

In the coming weeks, millions of students will be returning to college and university campuses.    The air will be full of excitement as existing students settle in for a new year and new students look forward to a new chapter. Dorms will fill up with boxes and suitcases and the quad will fill with tables representing campus activities and student organizations. Campus bookstores will offer extended hours as students search for their books and materials. These students will spend hundreds of dollars, some over a thousand, this semester alone.  Increasingly, this spend will not occur inside the bookstore.

If textbook affordability is important to your institution and you're open to learning about new bookstore
models, you'll want to request the recording of our interactive session with Labouré and Berea colleges from the 2016 NACUBO Annual Meeting. 

This well-attended session, which received a lot of positive feedback, covers how the new hybrid college bookstore model reduces textbook costs, improves bookstore sales and increases student satisfaction.
The recording and presentation materials can be requested by clicking here or on the button below.

Growing numbers of college students are abandoning the campus bookstore and purchasing textbooks from less expensive third-party websites - but it’s not only price that’s driving them away.

A recent survey conducted by Akademos on college student textbook purchasing and bookstore services reveals that “convenience” also plays a very influential role in where students decide to purchase textbooks and course materials, with 58% of students citing it as a critical factor affecting where they buy or rent

It’s abundantly clear that high textbook costs are a critical issue for colleges and their students, however there is no effective way to address this highly-complex issue.

Our new study, available free-of-charge, provides proof that addressing college textbook affordability with specialized online bookstore solutions is highly effective and positively impacts student satisfaction, bookstore sales and academic success.

The study contains a comparative analysis from two surveys recently conducted on college student purchasing behaviors and bookstore services. One survey was administered exclusively to students currently enrolled at an Akademos partner schools, and another,  administered to college students enrolled at a random sample of "non-partner" institutions. 

Our new white paper, Why Students Are Leaving The College Bookstore, was released today and is now available for download. 

Find out how other institutions are transforming their college bookstores into a best-in-class student service and seeing  significant improvements in   textbook affordability ,  student satisfaction,  and  bookstore utilization  - even as student demands for accessibility, convenience, and affordability accelerate.