A bitter battle for the textbook market in Amherst, Mass., is being waged by anything but the book, to judge from an article in today’s Daily Collegian, the student newspaper at the University of Massachusetts’ flagship campus.

The competitors for students’ textbook business are, on the one hand, several local independent booksellers, and on the other, the university bookstore, which is run under contract by the Follett Higher Education Group, the nation’s largest collegiate-bookstore chain.

It seems that a number of professors at the public university would prefer to give business to the local bookstores rather than to the Follett-run university store, so they provide their required reading lists — a prerequisite for ordering books ahead of time — only to the independent store owners. Students can buy their books wherever they want, but a store that has the books in stock has a clear advantage over a store that needs to order them.

To level the playing field, according to The Daily Collegian, the director of the university store, Ken Kahler, posed as the parent of a student and asked a professor of English what textbook she planned to assign. The professor grew suspicious, and very soon the store official was unmasked.

“When I confronted him, he admitted that he did not have a daughter in my class and that he had deliberately deceived me in effect to steal our orders from the bookstores with whom we had placed them,” the professor, Suzanne Daly, told the Collegian.

Mr. Kahler was reprimanded by a vice president at Follett, the newspaper reported, and the university official who oversees the contract with Follett has apologized to Ms. Daly and other faculty members who have complained of the store’s business practices. —Andrew Mytelka