What does this agreement with the uni say exactly? Are you allowed to suggest other book stores?

@user111388 I don't know what the agreement says. Once I asked to read it and had my request refused. I can, and usually do, suggest to my students that they buy elsewhere -- but this is one section of a large calculus course, which uses a "custom edition" of the book, which is bundled with software that the students need. So in this case buying elsewhere is somewhat complicated.

This seems pretty clearly a question to be asked of people at your university.

@user111388 My colleagues regularly complain about problems with the bookstore. As for my dean, I don't know, but to be blunt he doesn't seem to care much about faculty concerns in general.

@academic I fear a direct answer to your question can only be found in that contract. Here in the UK, it's quite common for faculty members, when a polite informal request for a copy of such a contract is refused, to follow up with a formal Freedom of Information Act request for a copy of the contract. But I don't know whether the US Freedom of Information Act applies to universities, nor what the etiquette is in the US about lodging a Freedom of Information Act request with one's own employer.

@RaghuParthasarathy I certainly agree. But which people? How do I find out? This would be my first time trying to push for significant changes outside my academic department, or "playing politics", and I'm looking for advice on how to do that.

Can't these students just buy their books on Amazon?

@Trusly: I think one should rather recommend another local bookstore to not support Amazon's questionable practises.

Find out: who in your administration gets upset if the students are unhappy? Maybe also a letter to the head office of the bookshop company may help if it is polite, but clear? Prepare for a several years battle to change the contract, so find short-term intermediate solutions for your students.

Wait....campus bookstores still sell textbooks? And students still buy them there? Why??

Not exactly related to the question proposed, but the way textbooks have been sold long before the pandemic, wouldn't students resort to buying them online, or finding a way to get PDF's of them if necessary?

Don't tell OP the students don't read the books anyway.

@workerjoe They read them... the day before the exam.

Deadly pandemic? Is that still a thing? Does anyone have a chart available of students dropping dead of a virus at college/university campuses?

At my old university, instructors were reprimanded if enough books for their class were not sold - this prevented the sharing of pdfs and such (for those that did not know how to search online and download) as a way to maximize profits for the university bookstore (distinct from the university). One approach I liked was a math professor that wrote his own spiral-bound book, which sold for $10 when the alternatives were $100+ textbook for the latest edition. (Why are there 17 editions of a calculus book anyways; what’s changed in the last 200 years in this regard?)

@davidbak: There's ~5k deaths per day from Covid despite lockdowns, that counts as a deadly pandemic to most people. The fact that students aren't dropping dead proportionately is off topic.