The beginning of the year is Christmas come early for two local monopolies: Labyrinth and Pequod. The former is the only major bookseller in Princeton; the latter supplies course packets. Both are sometimes aggravating and almost always overpriced, and together they comprise the only places in town for students to buy course-reading materials. At a university as wealthy and literary as ours - one that features a book on its crest - much can and should be done to improve this situation.
Labyrinth is the newer of the two monopolies. It opened in November 2007 and was supposed to give Princeton the true academic bookstore that some felt it lacked. In a decision that now seems misguided, the University was so confident in Labyrinth that it pressured the U-Store into ending its book business.
I'll give credit where credit is due: Labyrinth has largely succeeded in giving Princeton its academic bookstore. Though it lacks the charm of Micawber and feels more industrial than the old U-Store, it has a wider selection of retail academic books and even occasional book readings.
But Labyrinth has failed to live up to its other duty as the only course-book vendor in town. Last spring, during the first semester of the new monopoly, few students had anything positive to say about Labyrinth. They've made some improvements this semester - the books for some humanities courses are now open stack, and you can pay with your prox - but they're still using the closed-stack system for many classes, often classes with large, expensive textbooks, which is significant because the closed-stack book fetchers sometimes don't tell you how much your books cost. Furthermore, Labyrinth has yet to introduce a price-match policy on textbooks, meaning that it's still even less economical than the U-Store was.
When Labyrinth was announced as Micawber's successor on Nassau Street, President Tilghman said, "I can't imagine a better successor to Micawber than Labyrinth." Tilghman wasn't the only one with high hopes, but in its second semester of operation, Labyrinth has continued to let down all of us who would prefer to shop for textbooks in person. The University should pressure Labyrinth to make more significant improvements by entertaining alternative retail ventures to provide students with textbooks locally.
The Pequod monopoly is even more egregious, since it can't be avoided by purchasing online. What makes it especially twisted is that students are penalized for taking classes with professors who have the initiative to order a pequod for their class. Pequods are expensive and routinely out of stock, meaning that courses for which the readings are posted online are cheaper and sometimes more convenient for students, since printing is free at computer clusters. To end this unintended inequality, the University should supply pequods free of charge.
In addition, efforts should be made to facilitate pequod reuse. Currently, pequods are printed with not only the course number, but also the semester date printed on the cover, implying to the owner that the packet is useless when the semester is over. From what I've seen, most pequods are thrown out the day after Dean's Date. This is a waste of both paper and students' money. More professors should make an effort to keep the pequod for a given course the same across semesters, so that students could keep and resell their pequods the way they would with textbooks.
Relative to more controversial issues that Nassau Hall routinely deals with - the alcohol policy and eating clubs come to mind - it seems like a no-brainer that the administration would want to improve students' access to course materials. Everyone would benefit from subsidized pequods and a more student-friendly Labyrinth.
In the student referendum last spring, 36 percent of respondents said that decisions made by the administration in recent years have led to a decline in student life. Only 21 percent said that recent decisions have improved student life. Nassau Hall could do much to improve its image by working toward cheaper and more convenient access to the literature our courses require.
Michael Medeiros is an astrophysics major from Bethesda, Md. He can be reached at mmedeiro@princeton.edu.
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