My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse.

Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.

All the US universities outsourced their bookstores.

Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.