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University Textbook Exchange Software
PageMap writes "With the textbook-buying season upon us, many universities and student organizations are attempting to combat the on-campus bookstore's overcharging by starting up their own grassroots book exchange efforts. The problem is the seeming lack of available web-based software to facilitate an efficient book exchange. Is there such a thing as free web-based software made for this type of use?"
Depending on how you wanted to do it, it seems like it would be fairly easy to modify a store front or auction software to handle the specifics of text books.
At my school, we kept PDFs of the student solutions manuals on the school network. This was probably a violation of copyright law, but it's an effective countermeasure to being charged $40 for a tiny paperback book.
What you are looking for is consumer-to-consumer sales software. This is often done with an auction model. However, most technologies to do C2C are patented out the you-know-whatse in many jurisdictions, either by eBay or by the latest holding company to sue eBay.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is where I would look....
http://sourceforge.net/
In my first two years I faithfully bought my books from either the campus bookstore or the student union run bookstore (student's consign their books)
Then I discovered Chapters (Maybe Amazon is the same) would order almost anything. Of course there was a week or two waiting period but when you are talking $63.50 versus $118.95 it is worth it.
So if your prof. insists on using new books or has to have the latest edition, don't forget book stores. Even smaller ones can sometimes order in texts, you just have to pay in advance because they can't sell it to normal people if you don't buy.
Web Based? In C? This is why amateur programmers don't do large scale projects.
It is a fairly simple procedure, but if you don't know about code why don't you stop telling people to do it themselves. It's obviously outside of your grasp, and if you think that 1,000 lines of C code could come close I'll pay you a dollar a line to come up with a complete P2P book selling server with client software that is cross platform.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
But subverting one of the university's ways of making money just means they have to raise tuition...they'll get it from somewhere.
I feel it would be more relevant, realistic, and admirable to instead try to get your university to divert less funds into the sports programs, and more into academia.
Chris
The users are too lazy to type a couple of characters into Google
Too lazy, or too busy to take an hour experimenting with fruitless queries? Not everybody is enough of a Google master to get relevant results on the first, second, or third try. What keywords did you use in your query?
If they had been written in an object oriented language (such as C++) instead of Perl
Perl supports object orientation, and so do Lisp and Python.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course there will be massive shipping fees to mail a text book. We're talking about something to exchange it in person with a fellow student at your school.
Two things.
First I recommend people check with their local used book store. Some of them throw away textbooks.
Second my school would change the books used every semester to "combat" this recycling. (Oh they would never say that to your face)
I'm glad to see your college education was successful enough for you to still be completely oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of university tuition financing is through private finace -- student loans are almost always merely guaranteed by the government but not a single dime of your-hard-earned-tax-dollars are spent. The fact that it is subsidized in very limited circumstances (extreme financial need or extreme academic achievement) is quickly mooted by the fact that most college graduates pay taxes the rest of their lives as their parents and children no doubt will..
Yeah, my university (Purdue) actually has one of it's own: "purdue.forsale.books" which is on the university's news server.
There are also purdue.forsale.housing, purdue.forsale.computer, and purdue.forsale.misc.
I use them all the time to get stuff. I built my computer off of parts I obtained from the newsgroups, actually.
Easily searchable, fast because it runs off the schools servers (which I use to access it). I imagine there's something like that at a lot of schools, and there are just lots of students who don't know about it.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Universities get most of there money back at sports games. That is why so much money is spent on them and less is spent on the academics.
For everyone here who complains about college text prices, how many have actually WORKED in a a college bookstore? It's easy to accuse of price-gouging when you have no understanding of how the industry actually works. The biggest offenders are the publishers, not the stores.
When a new textbook package comes with worthless CDs (or in one case, 3D glasses!!) advertised as "free add-ons", it achieves several things. First, by only making these worthless packages available instead of the book by itself, the publisher can basically force professors and students to buy new editions every year. Second, it can then raise the price liberally to account for the so-called "free" material. Publishers HATE used books, and go to some odd lengths to prevent used copies from being viable for very long.
Yeah, high prices suck. I have to pay them too. However, at least I know who is really at fault when I do.
How about fewer questions and more shut the hell up???
1. Don't buy new books right off the bat. This should be obvious. You can get it used later on, or you might find out that the textbook for the course has changed or it's gone to a new version. Profs won't expect you to have the texts on the first day, or not even the first week when you're in first year.
2. Don't put your trust in any heavily advertised "We'll buy your used textbooks" program. They'll pay you $15 for a $90 textbook and then sell it for $67.50.
3. Do find out who the professor of your course is. And then compare your knowledge with the knowledge of the people who took it last year. If it's the same professor then you can probably dive into the used book market. If not, wait until you get the course outline or other official piece of information and get the actual title and volume, and then you'll know if the people with the used books have what you want.
4. If you are trying to get your books early and can't get a course outline to find out what book will be used for a course, then try scouting the 'official' bookstores because they usually know well in advance and have everything labelled in their stock supplies on the shelves. I always go on a scouting trip in early september with a notepad and take notes on prices to make sure people selling used books aren't selling above the retail prices. (This does happen once in a while.) On this scouting trip, I usually end up explaining to some first year kid and their parents why they should put down that $500 stack of books and wait for used books.
5. One you are sure of what books you actually do need, then make it your religion to scour those used books boards (online or not) and if you see something you want, then phone them up instantly and pick it up.
6. When you have all your books, don't go writing in them or whatnot. You want to have them keep their value so you can sell then for $5 less in the next semester. Remember that you can sell a used book for almost exactly the same as you got it (or probably even more) but with new books, your profit ceiling is probably only 75% of the retail price since the 'official' store's supply of used books is generally priced at this level.
You can use the site or download and install a single university version.
I've used it in the past, and was about to reinstall and promote our site. It works well.
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