Undergraduate FAQ

Site License Described

The basic terms of our site license are as follows: every student who takes the course and chooses to use our CDs must purchase a new CD set. Due to new built-in security features, students who purchase used CDs from past students of this course will discover they do not work. The CD sets will only work properly when the student purchases them new.

We created the terms of this license for a few reasons. Unlike a textbook, our software requires our programming staff to be constantly modifying our code so it remains compatible with current technology. For instance, Microsoft regularly modifies or upgrades elements of their software, which on several occasions has caused our software to work improperly. In these cases, our staff must rewrite our code to remedy the problem.

If students resold their CD packs to the campus bookstore then the CD sets would circulate for several years. In turn, students would buy CD packs that were no longer compatible with current technology. This would create a technical support nightmare for the school, the students, and our technical support team.

In addition, publishers typically sell textbooks in three-year cycles— meaning, every three years textbook publishers release a new version. Instructors then require students to buy the new book; making previous editions obsolete, which can be very frustrating for students who just bough the book the previous term and now are unable to resell it. This problem never occurs with our CDs.

What is interesting about this three-year buying model is the bookstores, not the publishers, make the most profit. When bookstores buy textbooks back from students and then resell them, they net approximately $30-40 per book (depending upon the initial cost of the book. In the case of accounting textbooks, they typically range from $110-130 retail). In the life of a given textbook, it is not uncommon for this cycle to repeat 5-8 times—thus giving the bookstore between $150-320 of profit per book, which excludes the markup profit on the initial sale (usually between 23 and 40 percent). Therefore, a bookstore may profit between $190-350 for the life of a textbook. A publisher in this scenario would only profit around $70-80. We find no objection with this standard business plan of bookstores— its capitalism at its finest.

One of the important distinctions between textbook publishers and us is we must provide support for our products after we sell them. We are involved with the students through the entire course. This support increases our costs. Therefore, if the bookstore were buying and selling the CDs, we would be forced to sell the CDs at a high cost to cover our recurring expenses. In this scenario, the student loses. They pay high prices for products that would work more erratically as time progressed for the reasons outlined above in the third paragraph. By eliminating the resell market, we can afford to provide great support, deliver our products at low costs, and provide brand new products to each student. In this scenario, the student greatly benefits.