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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?"
Perhaps politics and bureaucracy are the main roadblocks to creating something like this instead of html, cgi, and perl.
Profs have this one down cold: change the text each semester. Most of the 300 and 400 level classes I took had a new textbook each semseter, so selling the old one was worthless because there was no market.
I still have my Economic Geology (ore deposits) text, and it is a joke. It had little to do with the course material and was useless as reference for finding economic minerals. It was a compilation of theoretical publications.
Fortunately, the prof also sold his lecture notes. Luckily, all the test questions came from the notes, so we all had a chance to pass the class.
UK Based Book Exchange Very good, Very free.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
What about getting Universities to use open content textbooks?
I know this isn't a viable idea just yet and that it won't help people who need a particular text book for what ever course but it would be nice to be able to learn something new and complex without having to pay a million private companies for the privilege.
(I wonder how many slashdot readers it would take to whip up a first rate textbook for C programming)
SPU also runs a similar service which, while I did not design, I was in charge of upkeeping for a year and had to do some fairly major rehauling. It's designed using ASP with an exchange database (I know, I know...), but it might be worth checking out:
http://199.237.180.240/be/
I might even have the source for the asp pages, if anybody wants them. The main difficulty for a project like this though, is getting the word out. The best system is useless if 80% of students don't know about it. Whoever plans to undertake something like this should make sure they have a good advertising plan laid out.
Do not read this sig.
Here at the University at Buffalo, our Student Association has created their own Book Exchange system in what appears to be ASP. This is probably the best solution, as each college can customize their own system to their specific needs. (I'm not too sure I'm big on ASP, being a PHP fan myself, but it seems to work out well.)
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Stanford has something called "Bookshare".
It's student developed and student maintained. Basically, you sign up and then list any books you own but don't currently need. By searching through the combined listings, you can usually find copies of your required textbooks for free. Then you return them at the end of the quarter/semester.
share.stanford.edu is the general site, and it includes subsections for books, music and movies.
I've used it myself and found the textbook library very useful. The textbook library is linked to the current course offerings, so it all works quite efficiently.
Great clean user interface, and a simple concept. Could serve as a great model for an opensource effort, in my opinion.
Don't by the recommended books, because they won't help. Seriously, unless the prof actually teaches straight out of the book (in which case, why take the class -- you can learn it by yourself), you shouldn't need them. Instead, listen in class and take good notes.
My experience (and I've had plenty in higher education) is that it's almost always more helpful to buy books NOT on the lecturer's list. Why? Because most lecturers recommend books that present things in the same way they teach them (ie they recommend the books they base their courses on). So if there's something you don't understand in class, a book won't help if it explains things in the same way.
As a maths/physics student I found the Dover series to be great. Cheap (under $10 a few years back), student-level texts by authors whose understanding of the subject far exceeds that of most lecturers. Schrodinger on quantum mechanics, Einstein on relativity, Fermi on thermodynamics, Lanczos on classical mechanics...They might not be of much direct help with problem sets, but they're great for giving insights into the subject. They do have a couple of drawbacks, though -- in some subjects they can be out of date (so you're safe with most maths and undergrad physics, not so good on genetics...). The other one is that they often assume quite a lot of knowledge about related subjects, which means you then have to buy another Dover book on that etc. But that's part of the fun.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
As a professor, I can tell you that we feel captive to the publishers. For first-year surveys they have a deliberate policy of issuing new editions of textbooks every two years or less! With new paginations, new chapters and no availability of the older editions from warehouses, you pretty much have to bite the bullet and go with the new to ensure there are enough texts on hand for your freshman class.
And the reason that upper year course books change often can be two-fold. One is that the professor is just as disappointed as you (often having adopted the text sight unseen six months before the start of classes). The other common problem with text carryover is different professor teach much different courses under the same title. Some department get around this by adopting a standard text for shared classes, but that usually only applies to the more general, lower-level courses.
There are some cost-effective options -- custom readers from publishers like Pearson in my field are amazingly cheap. With their material, I've put together a tutorial reader covering an entire term for 21.95 US. That's less than half the cost of a lousy course package photocopy set put together by our monopolistic bookstore.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
The school I went to had us rent text books. We paid a fee each semester (much less than buying even one book). The school had the books in a part of the library and at the beginning of each semester, we went and checked out our books for the semester. If someone really wanted to buy one of the book, they could. Discontinued books would often be sold for $1. After the first week of classes, they were OK with people getting books for classes they were not in. At the end of the semester, the books were returned.
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