Oct. 5--The store is one of the oldest in the city.

It was around before the state Capitol burned in 1904 and during its time has been a prerequisite stop for most students attending UW-Madison.

University Book Store, 114 years after it was founded as a cooperative, is no longer a must stop for students.

Textbooks can be purchased at used book stores and new books on Internet sites like eBay and Amazon.com. Digital books can be downloaded direct from the publisher. Larger book stores, like Borders and Barnes & Noble, have also cut into the general book market. Badgers sweat shirts and T-shirts can be found at the two campus-area Walgreen Drug Stores and numerous other shops on and near campus.

"Competition is probably good," said Pat McGowan, president of UBS. "Students, when they are paying high textbook prices, it's nice for them to see that they're similarly priced at multiple bookstores. There was a time when the bookstore was the only alternative."

That's no longer the case and UBS, a privately operated company that doesn't receive funding from UW-Madison, has evolved.

It has stores in six locations, including a computer store at the corner of Lake and State streets. On Wednesday, the company opened its first store in the Milwaukee area at Brookfield Square mall, a move that will require the store to sell UW-Milwaukee and -- hold on now -- Marquette Golden Eagle apparel.

Q: How did this business start?

A: It was originally a book-buying co-op and then in 1914 it turned into a trust. It has as its beneficiaries the students of UW-Madison. It's a for-profit, tax-paying trust and it's a hard thing to describe to people who you're trying to business with, sometimes. We have a board of trustees not a board of directors. There are other bookstores like us. It was popular to set bookstores up as co-ops back in the late 1800s. Harvard did it. Yale did it. Texas still is a co-op. And there are others that have some sort of an ownership that is not owned by the university but is there to serve the university.

Q: What do students gain as beneficiaries?

A: In our case, the idea is that we are to sell books at the lowest price consistent with sound business policies. We take that as a price that allows us to have a reasonable return on equity and still pass on savings to students. A normal textbook mark-up at your average college bookstore is about 25 percent. We work in the 18.5 to 19 percent range. So, we're 6 to 6.5 (percentage points) lower than the average college bookstores. There have been some years where the bookstore has lost money and some years where the bookstore makes money.