Will College Bookstores Become Obsolete?

There's been some controversy brewing over at ZNet Education, where blogger Christopher Dawson has raised the ire of college bookstores.

Last Friday, Dawson went into detail about what he calls "the textbook racket," and suggested that, to save money, college students forgo their campus bookstores in favor of renting books, buying used ones from Amazon, going digital, or using the Internet.

On Sunday, Dawson posted a reply from Charles Schmidt, the director of PR at National Association of College Stores, countering a few of Dawson's points, namely that "online prices were higher for 27% of the textbooks examined by the study."

The discussion is fascination, and worthy of reading in full.

In Dawson's own words:

From my perspective, it’s time for the entire model to change, meaning that those employees at the bookstores (whether student or otherwise) will need to retool and redeploy, just as every other employee must do when faced with obsolescence.