As the lifespan of books becomes shorter and shorter, the percentage of total sales from used books will continue to decline, meaning that bookstores will make new book sales a larger and larger percentage of their total sales. The ordering process which faculty pursue. When faculty members wait until the last minute to order texts, they often force bookstores to pay high rush shipping costs, a cost which gets passed on to students. Last minute orders also prevent bookstores from ordering less expensive, used copies, which are always the first to be distributed by publishers. Faculty often do not consider price when choosing texts for courses.
Most faculty receive complimentary copies of new texts from publishers as a promotional tool.
When a faculty member then decides to utilize that text in a course, they often have no idea how much the item will cost students. A gap between faculty and student perceptions extends to priorities for textbooks. While faculty seem to feel that the newest editions and most high tech media effects are important in a textbook, students often do not agree. Faculty can no longer have large sections of books reproduced by local copy centers, and then sold to students. While packets of reproduced materials used to be sold to students for little more than the cost of the reproduction, faculty must now ask students to purchase their own copies of books, even if they will only need to read a small portion of that text.