In addition to the thousands of dollars spent on tuition, room and board and fees, college students will also spend hundreds on textbooks required for classes.

On average, $4.7 billion is spent on new textbooks every year, according to the National Retail Federation, and in most cases, the knowledge students garner from those textbooks is the only thing they get from that investment.

Weber State University freshman Becky Sandoval was sent fuming out of the school's bookstore, after they offered to give her $25 for a new-edition human physiology text she purchased only six weeks prior for $150.

"I had a stack of books, I had maybe 12 books I tried to sell back, and they only bought one of them back for a decent price," she said. "I just bought these books for the summer semester that just barely ended, and I know they're using these books next semester, and they didn't take any back."

Like many of her peers, a frustrated Sandoval turned to the Internet to find a better buyer.

"You can almost always get them cheaper online than you can at the bookstore, even used," she said. She has already sold two of the books she tried to sell back to WSU online for much higher prices than she expected. However, when ordering or selling online, Sandoval said the downfall is that it often takes days to deliver the product.

College bookstores are notorious among students for buying only a select percentage of used textbooks back from students at the end of each semester, a practice Beat the Bookstore's co-owner David Monk says is "inefficient."

"Their mission is to contribute funds back to the school so that tuition prices can remain lower," he said. "As you know, not only are textbook prices going up astronomically, but so are tuition prices, so obviously the school bookstore is not doing its job."

However, bookstores operate under a contractual agreement with textbook wholesalers in order to keep the industry afloat. The National Association of College Stores reports that bookstores only make about 5 cents for every dollar's worth of a new textbook.

"The wholesaler agrees to provide bookstores with the aid of operating their business and the bookstore agrees to provide a portion of their buyback revenue to the wholesaler," Monk said. "It really is as simple as there's a big huge middleman in the industry."

With five Utah locations, Monk's textbook-only retail stores aim to provide students with a lower-cost alternative to high prices and lines at campus bookstores. They offer students in-store credit to offset the costs of purchasing another book for the following semester.