This past Fall, Texas A&M University-Texarkana (TAMUT) introduced the “Eagle Book Bundle”, a textbook rental program that includes all of the students’ required textbooks and is automatically billed to their account. The fee charged into the students’ account is calculated to be $24 per credit hour.
The school’s Office of Communication notified the students during mid-July through their institutional email. The notification email included information about the Eagle Book Bundle instruction and delivery process. In the following weeks, the school’s bookstore continued to send out emails reminding students to choose their delivery options. However, there wasn’t any mention of opt-out options.
It wasn’t until the beginning of the semester when students realized the fee in their account. “I found out when I was setting up my payment plan for the semester,” says Nathan By, an engineering student at TAMUT, “I had to ask the person at the [Business Office’s] front desk about that charge.” That was also when Nathan learned about the opt-out option. Nathan will not be participating in the Eagle Book Bundle next semester since he feels like “certain courses don’t actually require you to have the book, so [he] wouldn’t want to get those books, and sometimes you can find the book cheaper somewhere else too.”
Business Office specialist Hailey Epps says that “even if [students] say that they didn’t know about [the fee] some of them are still happy to pay it, since […] then they can be good for the rest of the semester to get any materials that they need for their classes.” She considers the student’s reception was positive overall and says that “if [the students] wanted to opt-out they definitely could.”
The bookstore’s supervisor for the Eagle Book Bundle orders, Leslie Morales, says that “a lot of the students […] did have a lot of questions when they would come into the bookstore […] because a lot of them have not even heard of [the Eagle Book Bundle] before.” Leslie learned about the details of the bundle through her institutional email, but says that “that’s just because [she] read all the information and double-checked with the bookstore,” which seems to be an isolated case considering the student’s reception; she says that “a lot of people were confused, and some people were even upset about it.”To learn more about the Eagle Book Bundle process, details and opt-out options you can visit TAMUT’s specialized page here.