CBX Bookstore's closing in the Village prompted the store to dispose of its unwanted textbooks this past week – and also upset several students.
Several students went dumpster diving to collect books CBX threw away.
Mark Mosia, a senior elementary education major, said the dumpster caught his eye because it was embarrassing and sad to see.
"Hundreds of dollars worth of books that students have bought in past years or could have used are just being thrown out just because a store is going out of business," he said. "It doesn't deem them worthy of either donating somewhere else or just trying to recycle them."
CBX's store manager would not speak on record because he is not permitted to give statements, although he said the company is not trying to hide anything.
The manager said they have a process to go through to determine whether the book is valuable. They look to the Internet and other stores. If they do have some value, they send them to one of their other locations.
"The books that we disposed of are books that have been here for probably a year or two," he said. "They're older editions; they're things that don't have value. We were disposing of them, people had gotten wind of it and they came down and were taking them – which they are perfectly able to do."
Riley Byrnes, a freshman art major, said the disposal of the books was "like a slap in the face."
"It's frustrating because you have this company here that is providing books to a campus that are overpriced – we all know that we're getting kind of screwed over due to the whole resale process – and here they are just throwing books away," he said.
Byrnes said the books are in good condition.
While looking through the dumpster, another student held up a book and said, "It's still wrapped."
Byrnes replied, "That's disgusting."
Byrnes and the other student found the textbook for the Finance 101 class all students are now required to take.
"So this is an example of a book in which a student could use at Ball State," he said when he found the book.
The textbooks do not only have educational value, Byrnes said. People will read books for recreation as well. He mentioned White Rabbit, which sells used books. It is located on University Avenue.
"There's always people who need books," Byrnes said. "Even somebody who's interested in like astronomy. They might as well just offer them for free."
As an art major, he does projects with mixed media so he was not necessarily looking for books to read, but for scraps.
"I mean, I'm not going to sit here and talk about the environment, but man. It's just sad," Byrnes said.
Evie Lichtenwalter contributed to this story.
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