Westminster University’s bookstore will transition to an online shop starting Spring Semester 2025, transferring operations from the company Follet to Barnes and Noble College (BNC). It will be open for students’ orders on Dec 16, according to Westminster’s site.
Students can return their books until Dec 18, though the bookstore’s hours have been shortened to close at 2 p.m. as Follet “phases out” its involvement, according to Sheila Yorkin, chief marketing officer and head of the bookstore transition committee.
The bookstore space in Shaw Student Center will become an in-house Spirit Shop, selling school merchandise, notebooks, school supplies and other sundry goods. Yorkin said this would also include ‘pop-up’ shops that sell merchandise at events outside of Shaw.

This transition was initiated after Follet wanted to change to an online model, which led the Office of Marketing, Communication and Events to look into what other online bookshops could provide, according to Yorkin.
In an email to faculty about the change, it stated that Follet no longer thought that Westminster had the “volume to warrant an in-house” bookstore.
“Many schools are making the switch to smaller online operations because of scale,” Yorkin said.
Yorkin said that the shop as it is now, is two-thirds merchandise and doesn’t keep a lot of inventory because “books that come in, go out” as students use them.
New, used and digital copies of textbooks will still be offered on the BNC website, according to Yorkin.
During the end of their partnership, discounts will be offered on merchandise and electronics, ending on Dec 13.
Discounts on computer equipment and other electronics after the change can still be purchased through Westminter’s Barnes and Noble portal but they would be delivered and unavailable to pick up in the shop, according to Yorkin. All orders will be delivered through the mail room or directly to the address.
Because there’s no longer an option to pick up textbooks in person “it may be a little more important for students to order their books on time,” Yorkin said. “They do deliver it first class mail, so it should only be, you know, two to three days from their warehouse.”
Student Reactions
One student, Indra Krueger, a campus mailroom assistant and sophomore justice studies major, anticipated that the transition to delivery-only textbooks could back up the mailroom.
“I don’t like [the change], also because I work in the mailroom and I know there’s going to be so many students like ‘where’s my book’ and I’ll have to be like ‘we don’t have it […] good luck!’” Krueger said. “It’s going to make it harder for people to get the texts that they need.”
Sheila Yorkin, chief marketing officer, said they’ve had “conversations with the mailroom manager, and they’re looking into hiring another part-time person.”
Many students don’t go through the bookstore to buy textbooks but still receive them through the mailroom.
“I usually end up getting my stuff on Amazon through the mail room anyway so [the change is] not the biggest of big deals,” said Sophie Mackey, a junior health policy and equity major.
Students Krueger and Mackey said they don’t often use the bookstore for textbooks, but when they do, they just walk in to get it.

The average student spends around $1200 per year for books and supplies (according to the Education Data Initiative) so many students go alternative routes from main suppliers for a cheaper price.
“I feel like I’m not going to use [the bookstore] anyways,” said Madi Fortner, a senior justice major. “But they should’ve done it through King’s English.”
A couple of students agreed that they’d prefer Westminster to support a local business rather than a big corporation, especially after the campus coffee shop also switched to a corporate partnership last March by exclusively selling Starbucks products.
Fortner and Casey Berger, a senior political science major, said they either pirate their textbooks or buy them from Amazon.
Similarly, Brynnlee Walters, a junior sociology major, said she mostly gets her textbooks through Amazon, not the bookstore.
They all predicted that this transition wouldn’t affect them much because of this.
More on Switch to BNC
Many faculty anticipate that their students will compare booksellers to find the lowest price.
“I think overall, our community and our faculty try to find opportunities for students to get materials they need without having to pay for books,” Yorkin said. “Our faculty work really closely with the library, and then they try to create accessible materials online.”
Yorkin said the school was also looking to switch up bookstore partnerships after receiving “feedback from the community at large” about “not just the books, but the experience of the actual shop and the merchandise carried” and the hours the shop is open.

“Having a third-party relationship is harder to manage or have set expectations because you’re not completely in control of it,” Yorkin said.
Though BNC would also be a third-party relationship, the operation of the actual bookshop would be completely in the school’s hands and run by Westminster staff.
Spirit Shop
Yorkin said that Follet could only offer merchandise that was “out of the box [and] what most schools get” and that taking the shop in-house is an opportunity to get more personalized and less typical merchandise as well as the ability to choose different pricing that’s more “appropriate” for students.
While the shop will remain similar physically, the newest idea is to incorporate ‘pop-up shops.’ This means that the Spirit Store manager and potentially a student employee would sell school merchandise at athletic or school events or even during orientation or move-in, according to Yorkin.
Yorkin said this would give students, parents of students and faculty the option to see school merchandise “instead of hoping that people end up in Shaw [and] go to the bookstore.”
“We’ve talked a little bit about how we might even be able to encourage and integrate that business 101 class and how they sell merchandise,” Yorkin said.

An in-house operation means that the bookshop will be run by a Westminster employee, instead of a Follet employee, according to Yorkin.
“Follet [has] a big corporate business model of, you know, where their thresholds of revenue and profit are, whereas when we take it in-house, the spirit side of it, the merchandise, stuff, clothing, sweatshirts, paraphernalia, et cetera, we’ll be able to have kind of control over that,” Yorkin said.
Marie Dierman was recently hired as the new Spirit Shop Manager. After working in high-end retail at casinos, Dierman became an assistant manager of a snow gear shop in Park City, which eventually brought her to Westminster.
“We definitely want to work on getting more students in and excited about all the gear that we’re going to have,” Dierman said.
Yorkin said the bookstore transition committee would “love to get feedback” from students to “tailor items to what our community really wants” and will send out surveys.
Online Bookstore Portal
Though the site for the spirit shop will remain the same, the website for the bookstore will be changed to an online Barnes and Noble College portal, according to Westminster’s site
Faculty have been offered training sessions to learn how to request their textbook for classes and to answer any questions that may arise, according to Erin Coleman Serrano, member of the bookstore transition committee representing faculty interests and communication professor.
“Students log in to the portal and put their name and student ID in it […] the classes that you’re taking next term will show up and the books associated with it,” Yorkin said.
Faculty can put in notes to their students to communicate different circumstances like if there are no course materials required, if something’s available in the library or available free online, or if there’s a course packet required, Yorkin added.
“Barnes and Noble […] had a merger with a company called MBS, [its] one of the first college bookstores to go into this virtual space [so] the portal experience is really robust,” Yorkin said.
Coleman Serrano said that BNC had more options for more uncommon course requirements, like fake blood for theater classes, compared to Follet.
Coleman Serrano said that so far the transition was going “smoother than [she] thought” as they try to anticipate and address any issues with the change.

“[The only] difficult thing is we haven’t had a chance to interface with who the new bookstore representative is or will be. I’m not sure if they’ve [been] hired yet,” Coleman Serrano said.
Coleman Serrano said that the “communication piece” is always the most complicated as the committee works to prepare the faculty, mail room, and students for the transition.
She said that the bookstore transition would not affect the timing of how students receive textbooks because that was already a concern before the change, as many order online and get their books delivered to the mailroom.
“Sometimes, if you live on campus, it actually can take more time to get [your book] because of how it gets processed in the mail room,” Coleman Serrano said.
She was confident that despite the “moving parts” classes would go on as usual because faculty with “unique circumstances with their books are already communicating well with their students” and the library representative Liz Larson, “is working hard to make sure that we’ve got resources available for students.”
Future Visitor Center
Though the current plan is to keep the bookstore space as a shop for students, a long-term goal is to place that shop in a Visitor’s Center in Basis, according to President Beth Dobkin.
This would happen next summer rather than during the term and might take six months to a year, giving time for renovations, according to Yorkin.
Yorkin said they would still want to “maintain having something student-centered” in the Shaw Spirit Shop room but there are no specific plans for what that may be.