Mon 6 Oct 2008
A WSO Post introduces Springstreetbooks.org, a site for student book orders to avoid Water Street, which tends to run out and be expensive.
If Ephblog readers have ideas on doing this and making it work, as well as other possible uses (book swap / exchange?), I’d certainly welcome them, and will be inviting Joey to join this thread.
Rarely do I ask favors here, but this is a cause worth a bit of thought if you have the time. That goes for non-regular commenters too, all 800 of you.
Thanks!
October 6th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Hey guys,
thanks for posting Will =) I appreciate all the support you guys are giving me.
So yeah, like he said: i would be really interested in any comments/suggestions/ideas for the site. Obviously we have a lot of time before it really becomes useful (spring semester) so if anybody has some leet web design/javascript/php skills they would be more than welcome - right now everything is sort of hacked together from various online tutorials in PHP and XML and a couple large books from Schow
Thanks again =)
October 6th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Brainstorming:
Allow students to enter class book lists online (subject to verification by other students).
Create an informal exchange where students deliver books to each other at 2/3 retail– either pay each other or set up a payment intermediary which takes a small %. Honor system: if someone doesn’t pay, cut them out of the system.
Drupal. Ubercart.
.pdfs, secure anon system. Take payments and pay the copyright holders, but on your terms.
There’s real money and a potential business model here that would scale at least nationally; glad to provide advice & support. 5% equity and a board position?
October 7th, 2008 at 12:16 am
In every year of four I was on CC, someone tried to solve the difficult problem of linking supply and demand without doing through WSB. It seemed so possible, and certainly so desired, yet the stumbling block was always capital, to buy back books, and storage space, to store a huge inventory that no one would want for months between semesters in which a class was offered.
Your real deadline is end of fall, not spring. I’d say focus on just this fall-spring transition. And remember that you won’t want to work on this come final time, so you should be aiming for usability by Thanksgiving. You’ll be glad you set this early deadline.
Forget about summer, or “national scalability” for now; a success this end-of-fall will translate to people looking to use you in the future.
Direct buy is the easiest system for now, and might work for this transition period. Sadly it will only apply to classes taught both semesters, but that will help in some big lectures. Focus on these (make larger 100 and 200 level classes fully functional), while creating an abstract system that, of course, permits addition of every class eventually.
You could let students set their own prices, though this could be complicated and the effective bidding structure may frustrate sellers. You could set up a standard price based on Amazon’s rate, perhaps a standard subtraction from the new book price or a standard augmentation of the used book price there. The suggestion of one person to get a “pay me by paypal” functionality is brilliant, and a good measure to put in place. A simple page on policies or advice to sellers and buyers are easy to set up and can go a long way toward generating the right culture to lead to the site getting consistently used.
Be prepared to do this without the cooperation of the profs or College, at least not standard cooperation. WSB is sort of in bed with them, or has been in the past. I’m sure you know, though, that the organization you state you will donate proceeds to is in possession of full book lists every semester . . .
October 7th, 2008 at 12:31 am
History: the way Pooh Perplex did this was to sell at 2/3rds of cover/list, purchase at 50% of cover– on consignment, taking the spread. Storage space was provided by the College in Bronfman storage (same facility once used for science journals): students could ‘deposit’ books with the Pooh at any point, and would be paid their 50% if the book was actually ’sold,’ eg, purchased by another student for a class.
Remainders after a year were typically offered to 1914.
The amount of space needed for storage is far less than one may think. However, my (brainstorming) suggestion is to eliminate any inventory holding costs whatsoever: seniors-over-summer excepted, have the students (seniors excepted) simply drop the texts in the S.U. box system; recipient confirms they got it, pays.
National scalability: not your immediate concern, but, well, I’d think you could find someone to put at least a few $10K behind this, given that there’s a clear multimillion market. And those $ would let you do it right. No offense to Jonathan.
Did Steve Case work with the Pooh, or just the shuttle service?
October 7th, 2008 at 4:35 am
Have you thought of using the Amazon Kindle in the long run? The gotcha here is that it doesn’t handle graphics at the moment, but I would certainly ask, “Do the books really need to be printed on paper?”
Perhaps they do, in the sense that it’s nice to have four books spread out in front of you while you’re doing research. However, perhaps they don’t, or at least not all books have to be printed on paper. You also might do a study of whether any assigned books are in the public domain. If so, you could just point to their digital versions on the Web.
Also, you might encourage professors to use systems such as those offered by Safari Books (O’Reilly). This is for computer subjects, but the idea will probably spread to other areas over time. The professor goes online, picks the books and chapters desired, puts them in any order, and presses a button to generate a PDF file for distribution to students. If desired, the professor can hit a second button which will print paper copies and send them to the college bookstore within a week. In short, custom textbooks on demand.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Guy: Good comment.
I’m pretty amazed (and dismayed) to look at Vanderbilt and Belmont vs. what I understand of Williams: both Vandy & Belmont seem to be 80% electronic distribution of texts at this point, and I don’t quite ‘get’ what Williams & peers is (or isn’t) doing in this regard, in comparison.
As for Berkeley/Michigan/etc: all the readers were reproduced from electronic copy “on demand” when I was at Berkeley 10 years ago, payment ‘per page’ made according to the copyright agreements– at a point that Williams (etc) created readers without payment; I picked up a used Xerox DocuScan which could scan and OCR a few 10s of pages /min for $300 then; don’t really get while we’re still stuck with paper now. Remembering Judith Butler dropping into the grad reading room as I scanned Freud(’s correspondence with Fliess); it should be so much easier.
Have a littler of baby squirrels which fell out of the tree behind our house earlier tonight: the alarm just woke me to go out and make sure they’re still warm and give them some water. Hoping their mom will wake up soon and come get them. What an odd arrangement of nature: they can’t produce their own heat, yet, and evidently need hydration every 8 hours or so. (Don’t have a heating pad so I’m microwaving rice).
Somehow, they seem like the most important thing in Nashville today.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:58 am
On “going national”, there are already booksellers who have “gone national” with textbook buyback programs, including Barnes & Noble and ecampus.com which gives you a pre-paid postage label to ship your books to them and offers used textbooks on-line.
On electronic textbooks, many textbook publishers are now selling e-textbook digital download editions. There’s an article in this morning’s on-line Daily Gazette detailing pricing of these options at the college-owned bookstore on campus:
The article then goes on to describe the almost total lack of interest in these e-textbook products:
The article then quotes students at Bates College, the University of Southern California, Brown University, and Williams College saying they’ve never heard of the e-textbook option.
October 7th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
The article also contains links to free on-line textbooks, one for that College’s Bio 27 and Computer Science 37 courses.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
hwc: B&N (Amazon) etc.’s offerings are nation-wide marketplaces; they suffer from a variety of issues, including delivery time/reliability and the low prices they offer (typically less than 10% of list).
The potential I see here is for a series of “local” online marketplaces (like the Pooh) which enable quick, “low-friction” exchanges on small campuses– delivering a high % of list cost, at least 50%, back to the seller. The “trick” in the system is that it has to be easy– go online, view available stock, ‘purchase’ book X and have it pulled from available inventory– and it has to be effectively marketed on each campus as part of “the book buying process,” “what you do to get books–” when I arrived on campus, someone told me about 1914 and the Pooh, and what everyone did was roughly, “check the Pooh, check 1914, check the bookstore at the top of Spring St.” You have to market the behavior, and you have to market it on each campus– this isn’t a system that is likely to work on large campuses or as a inter-campus exchange, you need the “face to face” element.
On the electronic texts side, I haven’t actually looked into the specifics of what Vandy and Belmont are doing: I’ve just noticed that their students are using readers provided in electronic format, fairly consistently– and I probably have some bias in that I’m encountering laptop users. I’ll investigate and report back (some other night). But again there’s a point about “pushing” behaviors: I assume that etexts are a primary option, not an obscure one, in many courses at both institutions.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Ken:
I just did a spot check of one text:
Psychology by Gleitman et al. It’s used for the intro Psych course at both Williams and Swarthmore.
[b]New:[/b]
Barnes & Noble $124
Barnes & Noble member $99
Water Street Books $129
Swarthmore college-run bookstore $116
[b]Used:[/b]
Barnes & Noble $69
Barnes & Noble (free ship) $83
Water Street Books $95
Swarthmore bookstore $87
[b]buyback:[/b]
Barnes & Noble $45 (free shipping)
Water Street Books online $36
Swarthmore bookstore $58
I am pretty sure that if you were to check at Williams, a signficant amount of reading material is being handed out as “coursepaks” in printable, electronic form or old-fashioned Xerox copies.
Ordering books through Amazon, B&N, and eBay is everyday common occurence on college campuses these days. I know that my daughter purchased books online every semester. I think she tended to buy books she planned to keep like novels and art history books online. Maybe the massive textbooks (I don’t think she had many) that she wanted to resell were purchased thru the college bookstore.
October 8th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I was going to take a WSP class at Williams recently (but had to change my plans). I was amazed to find out that I was supposed to go to Water Street Books to find out what books I needed (the absurdities of the situation probably hit me harder than they might have someone in Williamstown, as I was trying to get my books from away). The book situation was very frustrating (and Water Street’s weird hybrid misposting of information about a volume didn’t help the situation — I had to bother the professor and even she couldn’t figure which of five possible volumes I should buy from elsewhere, based on the WSB information). In the course of emailing with students who were to have been my classmates, I got an earful about the book purchase situation (more the semester one than WSP, where there usually aren’t many books involved).
One set of factors that plays into Water Street’s hands is that the College seems slow in letting students know that they are actually enrolled in courses (i.e., won’t lose their seats to overenrollment) and Water Street often seems slow in posting the required reading lists with the necessary edition information (and sometimes without the ISBN information). Shipping costs and timing play a large factor in buying (and possibly needing to return) books at the last minute.
Professors could definitely help by posting, early on, on their departmental websites (or making available from the department by prompt returned email if they don’t want to post it; alternatively, post this information on WSO somehow or even in binders in the library — some faculty or staff person would need to take a lead in organizing this up initially) the reading list for each of their courses, with complete title, edition, and ISBN information (and including a note about whether other editions are acceptable and whether the book is actually required or is merely something the professor thinks might be helpful — students said they found out too late that they actually didn’t need a book and could have used a library one or that they could have used a much cheaper earlier edition; the entire Water Street system pushes them into buying books unnecessarily). Students should have a source of information about what books are needed other than the quasi-monopoly WSB (and I bet the accuracy of the information posted by WSB would improve as well). To enable book exchanges and buying used books online, the information needs to be available early, well before the semester starts. Professors could also help by checking that the WSB postings (and the departmental postings, if this suggestion were followed) for their courses were accurate and complete and, especially, that they contained the ISBN numbers and information about what was necessary/suggested.
And the College could do a much better job of letting students know their schedules earlier. Students who sign up, on the first day registration opens, for courses that turn out to be overenrolled aren’t told until registration has ended that they aren’t in the course; it just shows on the information they can see as though they are enrolled in the course. Then enrollment closes and they can’t replace the course until “add/drop” and, to add insult to injury, are charged a small fee for making a change (they would have loved to be able to make earlier) “late” (i.e., during add/drop). In large measure, overenrollment is a result of the push to reduce class sizes; in the old days, one more seat was easier to add. Now, it seems to happen a lot, with the consequence that many students don’t know, until the semester starts, what one-fourth or one-half of their classes will be and thus find themselves forced into the most expensive alternative (WSB) for obtaining books for those classes. I would imagine that this is more of a problem for freshmen and sophomores than for juniors and seniors, but I don’t know.
One student whose parents were paying full tuition thought that some members of the College staff and faculty wrongly assumed that the 1914 Library prevented there being money issues with respect to books, and that the very existence of the 1914 Library made the College lazy about or blind to the problems. She was paying for her books through working at a campus job and said that a lot of students do that. She said her parents weren’t rich and were grateful to be in a position to have been able to save for her tuition, but she knew her college money reduced their retirement savings and she often felt guilty about turning down her highly-ranked state flagship.