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?"

Comments

Creating a Monster

[fbroooooz]

When my parents went to school they actively participated in a grassroots book exchange program to protest the high priced book and supply store that had all the business. By the time I started taking classes at that same school, the small book exchange they started had transformed into an equally evil and overpriced textbook boutique.

Perhaps politics and bureaucracy are the main roadblocks to creating something like this instead of html, cgi, and perl.

Stanford's Bookshare

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Blame the Publishers

[ancarett]

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.