Textbook sales at the Cornell Store plummeted by 21 percent over the last four years, according to figures released this week by store officials. 

From the 2006 to 2007 school year to the 2010 to 2011 school year, the most recent year for which numbers are available, sales declined from approximately $9.5 million to $7.5 million. 2010 was the first year in more than a decade that the store made fewer than $8 million on textbook sales.

This drop is mainly due to the increasing prevalence and accessibility of e-books and other online resources, said Pat Wynn, the store’s manager. As more resources become available online, fewer students and faculty feel the need to buy bound books, she said.

“Students are beginning to feel that they can get by without textbooks in many classes,” said Margie Whiteleather, the store’s Strategic Projects Manager, who has worked for the store for 14 years. “Cornell faculty members have been adopting fewer and fewer textbooks.”

While the Cornell Store has been selling e-books for the past three years, store representatives said this has not compensated for the decline in textbook sales.

The Cornell Store can access fewer than 30 titles per semester due to copyrighting issues, Whiteleather said. Also, each e-book costs, on average, about 55 percent of the price of its corresponding, new textbook. 

“[The Cornell Store] looks to expand textbook rentals until digitized textbooks mature,” she said. 

The decrease in textbook sales is driven primarily by a decline in sales of new books. Sales of old and rental textbooks have skyrocketed over the past decade, although  they declined slightly as of late.

Whiteleather said the store has increasingly relied on rental textbooks. For instance, the store offered 270 new titles for rental this year, as opposed to 30 last year.

The Cornell Store is not the only college bookstore forced to adjust to a new industry model.

“Book sales are declining — they’re down tremendously,” said DeAnne Hazey, executive director of the Association of College Store Foundation, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article. “The college stores have to find other ways and other categories” to make money, she said, “otherwise they won’t survive.”

Whiteleather also attributed much of the decline in profit to websites such as Amazon and Alibris that sell used books for what she called “criminally low” prices.  

Whiteleather said she frequently sees used books on sale on these websites for the same price that the store pays its provider.

Some students said transitioning to e-books would make studying easier.

“People could be more productive if they had all of their textbooks in one place,” Scott Melby ’15 said.

Others, however, suggested that there is something irreplaceable about the old textbook.

“I’m more comfortable with the feeling of having a book in my hands,” Preston West ’15 said. “I like having something in front of me that I can underline, highlight and mark up.”