Textbook Buyback Company MyBookBuyer.com Gives Away 'Textbooks for a Year'

Milpitas, Calif. (Vocus) April 15, 2010 -- Textbook buyback company MyBookBuyer.com today awarded $1,250 to the winner of their Textbooks for a Year Scholarship essay contest. Danielle Goetter, a junior at Washington D.C.’s Georgetown University, wrote the grand prize-winning essay.

With over ten years in the used textbook buyback (http://www.mybookbuyer.com) business, MyBookBuyer knows better than most how much of a burden the skyrocketing cost of textbooks puts on students. The scholarship was designed to address the problems that the company had been hearing about from their growing base of student customers.

“Textbook prices are out of control and students need all the help they can get,” says company spokesman Paul Yokota. Yokota is a MyBookBuyer intern as well as a full time student at San Jose State. He says that many of the students who sell textbooks (http://www.mybookbuyer.com) on MyBookBuyer.com are just trying to offset a portion of the rising cost of textbooks, which is going up even faster than the cost of tuition.

The company decided to do something about it, offering the chance for worthy students to compete for the chance to win enough to pay for textbooks for an entire year. And so the MyBookBuyer Textbooks for a Year Scholarship Essay Contest was born. Not only did MyBookBuyer offer up a grand prize designed to cover textbook costs for a full academic year ($1,250), but they also offered two runner-up prizes of $250.

For the first time, students weren’t just selling textbooks (http://www.mybookbuyer.com/selling-textbooks.htm) to MyBookBuyer to relieve the burden of high textbook prices, they were coming to the site with the hope of being freed from that burden for an entire year.

Of course, the winning the scholarship wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Students had to write a compelling essay. MyBookBuyer selected an essay prompt that reflected the high value that they place on the importance of reading: “What book has had the greatest influence on you? How has it changed your life?”

Hundreds of students from across the country responded to the challenge, submitting essays from their schools in Florida, California, and everywhere in between. Even the MyBookBuyer team, who had been accustomed to textbook buyback (http://www.mybookbuyer.com/textbook-buyback.htm) coming in from all across the nation weren’t fully prepared for the number of essays that came flooding in.

“We were overwhelmed both by the response we got from students, and from the quality of their writing,” says Yokota.

But when it was all said and done, one essay stood out above all the rest. Danielle Goetter wrote her essay about reading “The Poisionwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver. She wrote how the book made Africa come alive in a way that her studies had never done. Ultimately, she credits “The Poisionwood Bible” with setting her on her current path, majoring in International Health at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., a program that combines public health and international development.

Her essay was excellently written and perfectly encapsulated the idea of a book changing your life. She calls the Poisonwood Bible “a formative piece in my desire to live and work in underserved areas throughout the world.”

Whether or not Danielle Goetter returns to MyBookBuyer to sell used textbooks (http://www.mybookbuyer.com/sell-used-textbooks.htm), she won’t have to spend a dime on books this year. For her, writing about how a book shaped her future has ensured that her academic future won’t be threatened by the high cost of books.

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