Textbook sales at the University Book Center have continued to slide, forcing officials to make up the difference with an increase in student fees.

Stamp Student Union Director Gretchen Metzelaars said students’ migration to online book sellers has hit the center’s bottom line, adding that the university abetted the bleeding in fall 2008 when it began releasing information to make it easier for students to shop around.

Since that fall when the university first released textbooks’ ISBN codes on Testudo, the book center’s textbook sales have fallen by $1.4 million, Metzelaars said. This year, a less profitable contract with Barnes & Noble went into effect, making matters even worse.

Student union officials are requesting a $16.44 fee increase for full-time undergraduate students for fiscal year 2011 — a 12-percent increase. The request adds to $165 in new undergraduate fees that administrators proposed last month and one year after fees decreased by 86 cents.

“Textbook sales have just tanked,” Metzelaars said. “Since we started putting the [ISBN] numbers up in 2008, there was a slow loss in textbook sales, and last year was awful.”

Metzelaars said the student union was able to balance the losses without increasing student fees last year because its previous contract with Barnes & Noble stipulated that it would receive $3 million minimum regardless of textbook sales. The newly renegotiated contract only guarantees a minimum of $1.5 million.

Metzelaars said she has not seen figures on the book center sales for this semester. Mike Gore, the store’s manager, said he could not release the data because Barnes & Noble College Booksellers Inc. is a publicly traded company.

But Gore admitted there has been little good news for so-called “brick and mortar” nationwide textbook stores, adding the university followed this trend.

“The students are going online — there’s no question about that,” he said.

Jim Osteen, assistant vice president for student affairs who oversees the bookstore, said textbook sales once subsidized other Student Union functions. Now, that’s no longer possible. The student union faces a $1.4 million budget shortfall. Officials plan to raise money through booking more events and eliminating positions in addition to increasing student fees.

The timing of the book center’s new contract with Barnes & Noble especially hurt the Student Union’s finances, Metzelaars said. As the book store’s sales slipped during the negotiations, the university lost leverage, she said.

“If it had been a year earlier, it would have made a difference of $300,000 or $400,000, maybe more,” Metzelaars said.

Metzelaars also acknowledged that students’ ability to shop around has ironically led to the need for increased fees, a point that’s significant for the state legislature.

The General Assembly engaged in a heated debate last year about whether a law requiring all of the state’s public institutions to publish textbooks’ ISBN information would lead to a need for higher student fees.

The law passed, and Metzelaars said it has not had too much of an effect at this university because it was already releasing the information. Still, the university’s new fees could provide an early indication of how the law will affect other institutions around the state.

However, P.J. Hogan, the University System of Maryland’s lobbyist, maintained that it was too early to gauge the bill’s effect.

“I think it’s way too soon to know the full impact,” he said. “The law just went into place in July. … Nobody knows yet what the full impact will be.”

slivnick at umdbk dot com