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The Wesleyan Student Assembly’s (WSA) Textbook Exchange Program (TEP) will open for its end-of-semester selling period at the University Organizing Center (UOC), located at 190 High Street. The selling period will take place from 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm on Saturday, May 15 through Friday, May 21. This semester’s TEP has been organized by WSA senator and chair of the Academic Affairs Committee Ben Garfield ’22, alongside senator Edrea Jiang ’23.

The TEP selling period provides students with the opportunity to sell used textbooks they no longer want so they can make back some money. Jiang explained the process for selling textbooks.

“Students can drop off any books that they wish to sell,” Jiang wrote in an email to The Argus. “A student volunteer will be at the UOC and ask for the student’s name, contact information, and preferred payment method. The volunteer will then record down the name of each book as well as the class it corresponds to. The student can decide the price at which they want to sell the book. After we collect this information, the student is all set. We’ll store the book with us and notify the student when the book is sold. If the book does not sell, students have the option of changing the price of their book at any time and can also choose to donate the book to the Resource Center after two years.” 

In September of last semester and February of this semester, the TEP operated on a reservation system for students to book time slots, to make the process easier due to COVID-19. The reservation system is no longer in place this semester; however, the TEP will continue to be outside as a safety precaution. Another change is that the TEP is being permanently moved to the UOC.

“COVID just accelerated our move from operating in Olin to the UOC since the process of moving the books wasn’t an option anymore because of scale,” Garfield wrote in an email to The Argus. “We’ll operate outside again, but that might become permanent as well, given the condition of the building and our not necessarily wanting a ton of people in there.”

Jiang is pleased with the way the TEP has proceeded during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think we’ve adapted our operations fairly well to the circumstances,” Jiang wrote. 

Likewise, Garfield expects the TEP to be successful this May, based on previous trends and current stock.

 “Our ‘buy’ window earlier this semester was the second-most successful all-time, which I attribute to the combination of us finally having enough books as well as the benefit of the reservation system,” Garfield wrote. “We also have missed 2 straight ‘sell’ periods due to Covid, and I’ve told everyone to just hold onto their books that whole time, so I’m expecting that we’ll be expanding our supply pretty significantly this time around.” 

Garfield will be passing over his TEP organizing responsibilities to Jiang at the end of the semester and taking a marketing-related role instead. However, he highlighted some of his visions for the future of TEP.

“I’d love to see us really making a dent in book sales, since it’s not sustainable for us to keep getting more and more books in the system without them leaving,” Garfield wrote. “We also have a ton of books that have completed their run through the system and are now eligible to go to the Resource Center’s lending library, but I’m worried that we have too many for them to be able to manage, so we have to figure out what to do about those. I think we’re probably 2 years out from a more routine setup that won’t have anymore growing pains, and those are some of the last pieces—transitions in leadership, permanence of location, and slowing of growth.”

Rachel Wachman can be reached at rwachman@wesleyan.edu