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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?"
I'm not sure if it's free or not, but the University of Texas has a book exchange. I've never used it personally, but I know people who have and they've always been satisfied with it.
IAALS.
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.
Why not just set up a BBS/forum? Plenty of free ones exist (phpBB, phorum being the two most popular), and a little moderation and regulation (i.e. one forum has offers, one side has requests), you could easily have an alternative to the campus bookstore.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
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?
Take a look at MySQLauction.
Freshmeat is also a good startting point.
Links to cheap textbooks
Perhaps politics and bureaucracy are the main roadblocks to creating something like this instead of html, cgi, and perl.
Called Amazon.com Marketplace. Gotta have a checking account to sell and a valid credit card to buy. Reasonable prices and scam-free transactions (if you're a seller), although Bezos does take a 10% cut of the sale.
I had about 3 orders come in this weekend for the books that have been on the shelves and listed on Amazon.com used market for 2 months or so.
www.php.net has all the software you need, although you might need a few other things, but they are free too.
;)
The customisation might take a while tho i guess
That wheel isnt round enough! Lets reinvent it.
A Member of the Rutgers University Student Linux Users Group has created just such a thing here at RU using PHP and MySQL. The site is hosted on our server here:
http://ruslug.rutgers.edu/bookswap/
I'm not completely familiar with the project - there's an "about this site" page, but no real mention of a license in regards to the php scripts being used. The author's link is on the about page - try emailing him.
Hope that helps and good luck sticking it to those bastards at efollet who, whether you know it yet or not, probably run your school's bookstore!
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.
for several reasons. Seeing as how I'm about to go into college, and with the cost of books ever increasing; I'm quite interested in this. C'mon /.! Share your ideas, make college cheaper for the current high school jouniors/seniors!
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
How dare you say we (association of campus book stores) are overcharging students? You piece of shit! We're charging a fair price so you pampered little fuckers getting subsidized education on public dimes (mine included, but not willingly or happily so). You ingrate! I see you little pricks come in the store and I just know 99% of you weasels will amount to NOTHING despite your silver spoon fed pampered ass getting a paid education by daddy and taxpayer. If you don't like paying for the books, just photocopy them from a friend (not like you're buying music or movies now anyway, you copyright violating little fucks), or better yet, pay to have your papers written on your behalf and your exam grades altered.
You people make me sick! In fact, I'm almost tempted to bring a loaded semi-automatic with me to work tomorrow and see how fast I can make you fuckers run.
You could... oh, I don't know... Write it yourself? About a thousand lines of C code (not much) done by an amateur programmer (like myself, in fact, I can think of how to do it right now, were I not so lazy, and the most advanced programming course I've taken is CS 102) and you're done.
I have been working on a website to help university student trade books for sometime. It still has some problems that I need to work out. Let me know if this will help. I was planning on having it up and running well before winter break. I am still looking for a better domain name if anyone has any ideas.
As recently mentioned on this very site:
www.communitybooks.org
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
We have one that was designed by our WWW Interest Group here on campus: wig.uark.edu/bookswap
There's also Come Get Used over here at Berkeley.
Hi. Our uni (UT-Dallas) put this together. Hi B/M. :^)
Demo site:
http://olbe.studentgov.com/
Project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookex/
Have fun. These seem to be reasonably successful implementations.
--Robert
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?
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
for New York State Universities
http://www.sunyexchange.com
A bunch of us at UIUC started one too (ABSOLUTELY FREE):
Illini Book Exchange, and we WANT to share our code and expand to other universities.
We've started atleast 4 other book exchanges at other universities recently (Cornell being one of them).
Here are some numbers
(Basically in 8 months, ~$100,000 worth of trades, over 2000 users and 2500 trades).
So, if you want us to help just get a hold of us through: here.
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)
You want to write websites in C++ just to get object orientation? You clearly have far too much time on your hands. Try PHP4 or, better, 5. You'll find most of the code you need for free in existing online repositories, and even find a fair bit of the syntax familiar.
I think the parent link is the closest answer to what was asked for. The software running the site can apparently be downloaded and adapted. Doesn't look OSS though.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
With a lot of upfront planning, the right database, SSL, page generation and CGI libraries, you might be able to hack it at 1000 lines of C code.
But it ain't going to be pretty, and it sure as hell ain't going to be maintainable, or easily upgradable with future needs.
1000 lines is too little space to be flexible enough in your C/C++ coding to make it manageable or extensible. It's barely enough room for logic, dispatch, and page display. You'd have to limit yourself to giving a "magic token" to a person who completes the sale which lets them know how to get in contact with each other out of band to make the swap, or offload that to Paypal.
Not exactly an Amazon auction, eh?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
at my university we had a "for sale" email list that if you wanted to sale stuff you subscribed to and sent emails out over, of course in doing this you subjected yourself to emails of anything else being sold, but you also had a good chance of selling your books and anything else.
so the problem at my school wasn't selling the books, but figuring out far enough in advance of the start of classes which books were going to be used for that class.
if you could find out a week before classes started, you could order your books online or find people w/the books and not be w/o them in class. professors seemed unwilling to post their syllabi on their websites a few weeks before classes started (these usually had required books in them) and the campus book store was anal and probably would have complained to the president of the university in attempts to quash any booklist puvlishing efforts had we tried
How about eBay?
Include the book title, university state and name in the description and people can search for books on their campus or on surrounding ones if it's a large city.
That really should be fairly easy to explain to people in a simple e-mail/leaflet when they sign up.
If eBay get enough students using it they may include a better interface to get more people using it.
Wiggly -- But I want to be different, just like everybody else.
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..
I had assumed payment would be offloaded anyways. The server would be in charge of cataloging books, searching for them, and removing them from the database once a sale is done (and recording the terms of the sale). You could do it in a kline + comments. Not easy, but not too hard either
They claim it takes 60 sec to make your textbooks available via their Used Textbooks section. Worth trying to sell one or two just to see how it works.
Help fight continental drift.
Put your books for sale on Amazon and buy your new books from amazon used as well. Not only do you get a far better selling price but you also get to buy and sell directly to other students rather than having to deal with the nasty campus bookstore.
They already have a lot of users and you get a better market that trying to sell just to students at your tiny liberal arts school.
Do what I did: I listed all my textbooks on Amazon marketplace and Half.com at the same time. When one sold one one site I pulled it from the other. In the end I made enough money to buy my new books from Amazon/Half used from other students.
Check out dogears.net. The guy who started it's an undergrad at Columbia. He offers the service to university without charge, if I remember it right. Works well, too.
...welcome our new bookswapping non-coding overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted Slashdot personality and accomplished programmer, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground book swapping software production caves.
(pssst...write your own software)
Anonymous? Not for me...I stand behind my comments!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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)
During the past year, on campus there have been three student attempts to tap the textbook market, of which two were textbook exchanges that involved commissions. (The other was an attempt in half.com arbitrage.) Only a textbook exchange has survived, though it had to change its name after the University threatened a lawsuit over copyrights. There are 641 books listed, but I'm not sure if any are actually moving.
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.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
At my University, Most of the classes have brand new books(none are less than a hundread dollars) every semester. This is too keep people from buying cheeper used books or getting FREE books from classmates who already took the class.
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.
- BU Books
- BearSwap
- Baylor Information Network (click on Community)
As you can see, here at Baylor we have a few options to choose from -- more choices mean better pricesSic 'Em Bears!
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
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.)
Want Slashdot headlines on your site? Try SlashHead
I list and buy all my textbooks on half.com. You can find pretty much any book you need, and make a ton of money by selling your books back at reasonable prices.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
I would set up a phpBB forum.
Give each department its own section. Have users list the books by title, ISBN, and asking price.
Since the server is searchable, and browsable by department, people should have no trouble finding buyers/sellers.
This is actually something that we (a group of undergrad students at columbia) are trying to do right now, with www.dogears.net: to bring a very effective online textbook exchange we've built, along with a bunch of other similar tools -- stuff that students could really use but hasn't been provided by university administrations for reasons already mentioned here -- to other schools. These things, when designed well (less than 10% are, and there have been many of them attempted) work REALLY well on a single campus, little promotion is required becase students' need for them is so high. But it promotion IS required, as with anything, and that's the problem. Usually, the creators are the only ones who have enough invested to be willing to get the word out about such exchanges, and that's why they always stay at their campus of origin. Because you can't make money with a textbook exchange (unless you turn it into the "evil enterprise" somebody else mentioned, thereby over time making it as useless as the university bookstore buyback system.) The whole concept is to cut out the middle man, and to create a useful/successful/beneficial exchange you can't become a middleman yourself.
We've got some really good ideas about how to make it work though -- to keep it free while making it attractive enough to people at other schools to run and promote -- and we're practically there, the project is gaining a lot of momentum, everythign's looking really good! If anybody is interested in more info, send me an email.
:-)
hahahahaa.....
(oh and that other guy above me)
But seriously, have you ever really tried to write a CGI in C that wasn't for a single, simple purpose?
(makes me cringe in retrospect, I brag about it to annoy java weenies)
Thank god for makefiles, I'd go insane. It makes you appreciate how easy it is to just dive into a perl script and Shift+Reload in realtime.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
isnt this usually in violation of the bookstore contract with the university?
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
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.
TexBooks
An alternate site is UT Life. I like UT Life's organization of class histories and professor reviews, like Pick a Prof, but they don't charge for access. Check their book swap section.
The people behind UT Life even emailed me when I was mentioned in The Daily Texan when they made the cover. Nice.
Check out store.doverpublications.com, especially the sections of scientific monographs and musical scores.
They have a large collection of reprints of famous textbooks at very low price.
I believe that they want to create a "Book Exchange" not a new way to sell books. In other words, not an auction, not an online bookstore, but a way for students to give away their books.
http://www.abebooks.com/
That is it my friends, capitalism at it's best. Education should be a priority-especially in these times as it seems America is out-sourcing everything, but then again, capitalism is about making money-not helping the society. Any how I hope more exchanges as these show up, why should the publishers that change a few pictures and spelling errors make money? (I know I might have a few but you're not paying me to fix them!)
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
I wrote a simple passthrough proxy so I could examine raw irc or aim chats, and it comes in at 95 lines.
Hey, that's really cool. Any way I could see the source code?
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
The obvious solution would be to write something web-based with an SQL backend. The buzzword - actually, it's an acryonym - is LAMP, standing for Linux, Apache, Mysql and some scripting language that starts with a P. That could be Perl, PHP or Python according to whichever you feel most comfortable with. {Note: you can actually embed PHP in the output of a Perl script, and a correctly-set up Apache server will interpret it. This has many possibilities for causing your successor unnecessary headaches. You can also generate JavaScript on the fly with any server-side script.}
One of my first ever bits of Perl programming was a simple message board. It then turned into a more complex message board, and then developed into a slagging contest. Finally, the long-standing threat that the privilege would be withdrawn in the event of abuse, became a promise.
At any rate, it shouldn't be too hard to write a textbook exchange. It's really just a special kind of message board.
Have some code for free: CREATE TABLE books4sale(id INT(11) AUTO_INCREMENT, vendor_login VARCHAR(20), isbn CHAR(10), title VARCHAR(80), author VARCHAR(80), courses VARCHAR(255), condition CHAR(1), price DECIMAL(6,2) PRIMARY KEY (id));
--MS EULA: Sharing is theft.
BSD: Sharing is not theft.
GPL: Not sharing is theft.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It looks like a simple troll to me. Better not waste your brainpower trying to dissect it. Just bask in its radioactive glow and get a suntan... or something.
At uni, we had this highly advanced object oriented system called a notice board. Students with books to sell instantiated a notice object (potentially sub-classed to add funcionality such as tear off phone numbers strips) and a drawing pin object. Combine the two with the singleton class noticeboard object and you have an advert.
See also
http://mit411.com
mostly for colleges in BC, Canada right now, but I see no reason why this can't be extended to other colleges.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
I didn't buy too many books while in college.
:)
What I hated was buying readers. Absolutely no resale value. It's like paying for phonebooks.
Almost every other book I needed was available in one of the main library stacks or departmental stacks. And if I couldn't find it in one of those places, I'd often find it in one of the public libraries that I'd frequent.
Renew, renew, renew.
Thank goodness for renewals through telnet
Humboldt State University in CA has one too. We smoke plenty of weed, but we still have enough in the way of brain cells to know that book stores prices are garbage.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
I looked at this too. I recommend zClassifieds by xgra http://www.xgra.com . It is great classifieds system that is also available as a PHP-NUKE and postnuke module. Why is this the best?
1) Ads can be set to automatically expire
2) easy to categorize books by classes or subjects
3) easy for users to modify, change, cancel ads
4) program is free
Search google for zclassifieds for examples.
I don't think auctions are the best way to sell text books. Usually students need these books regardless, so they want to know they'll get the book and not want to wait around for auctions to end.
My uni in the UK has had a book exchange program for years. Its got a simple and easy to use interface and is very successfull, its called a notice board.
Most student books are quite cheap in other coutries (once you do conversion to dollars atleast). You could ask students who are coming from their home countries to get the books you need.
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.
http://www.communitybooks.org/ has the software
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/24/1257 213&mode=thread&tid=185
Oh, and tuition is $50/semester. Punishing people economically for wanting an education is just plain wrong.
If they had been written in an object oriented language (such as C++) instead of Perl, the program would have been modular by default
Nonsense, OO design is difficult and people who code rubbish will produce OO rubbish as well. Of course Java rubbish is easier to understand than Perl rubbish.
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
I'm a part of a student org called SIN (Student Information Network) here at William and Mary that runs a set of services for the campus community, http://sin.wm.edu. We've been running for around 5 or so years. The current site is written in PHP and PostGreSQL. We have an online book exchange that is decently popular, and a bunch of other services. As far as the source, we arn't quite ready to open up the source, but we are working towards that goal!
From the article: "With the textbook-buying season upon us, many universities and student organizations are attempting to combat the on-campus bookstore's overcharging..." In a lot of Australian universities the bookstores, university admin and student unions are in cahoots, making cheap textbook purchases on campus very difficult. A state-wide used-textbook sourcing site would be the perfect solution, but it would have to be organised by someone other than the university or the 'student' union.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
You may wanna check out the system we use at Stanford.
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
I'd write my own textbook before I went to wikipedia -- from all I've seen in many visits, it's informative but often disconnected and occasionally superficial. It's an encyclopedia -- a reference to look up background information on topics of your choice, so don't expect more than that.
Texts that I use for intro courses in my field are written by teams of experts (to cover all the different specialties) and peer-reviewed by dozens of other professors. I agree they are too expensive, but at least they have completeness, continuity and usability in their field as a first principle.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
We created a self-sufficient, free online book exchange for students at Virginia Tech. We decided to take the idea and go one step further, allowing students to buy, sell, trade anything from subleases to textbooks. So far the system has been a big success, if you want more information email us at admin at virginiatext dot com.
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???
Extends to university and college administrations and professors. My understanding is that schools essentially coerce professor into structuring their syllabi to require at least one or two purchased textbooks. I'm sure a fairly clever teacher could make up a great course that would be based on Web research, photocopied articles, etc, but that's discouraged. Schools also seem to make sure the professors are using only the very most current texts - no one or two year old text for those students!
I am about to go to law school, and am considering buying a cheap scanner (I see them for less than 100), and scannning in the books at the start of the semester, then returning them quickly enough to get all my money back. I could maybe put the book on a CD.
Has anyone tried this?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
http://trodo.com ? Don't know if there is source code available, but I think it is a PHP/MySQL app... That might be a good starting point.
I have been working on desiging a text book site that would allow users to sell their books through Amazon.com, using my front-end. The site would also compare, new and used book prices from Amazon and Barnes and Noble based on XML feeds. I am not looking to make any money off of the site and I think I will post it on sourceforge very soon to get a collaborative development going.
Actually, the dude has something of a point (if somewhat enshrouded in rhetoric). Coming from the campus bookseller trade, I know that it's not the bookshops that are doing the overpricing, it's the publishers and distributors that are jacking up the costs for the average student.
True. It's the policies of the publishers. That's what they get the big bucks for. Thinkin up ways to stretch the dollar they make on a book.
The average campus bookstore has very minimal margins, especially when it comes to student textbooks - a lot lower margins than many other retail areas. Let's not forget to mention that on top of this, most campus booksellers offer 10% (or more) student discounts.
A campus bookseller offering 10% to students. How novel. What a deal. If you just happen to be a student strolling by the campus bookseller, you'll get a break.
It's easy enough to direct your anger at the visible front of the bookselling industry, however peel back the layers and you'll find that it's not the retail stores who are ripping the students off...
So true. Peel back the layers and you'll find out that each layer is ripping you off. The publisher, the writers, the bookstore,...
They say that a car is the second most expensive asset most people purchase, after a house. I'd have to say it's your diploma. If you do it by $ per square foot or weight, it's got both beat by several magnitudes. Hell, I bet if you ask what your worth is to a slave trader, that piece of paper's probably worth more than you! Fancy that.
And yes, it was flamebait. It tastes so good in the morning, doesn't it? There's nothing worse than a troll who hasn't incited the proper level of anger, but rather a modest discussion about the realities of the topic he brings up.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
You can sell your books back to the bookstore when you're done with them. You get money, the bookstore gets used books to sell at reduced price.
The Distributed Library Project as discussed here might be a good option. The software itself can be found at Thoughtcrime.org
It's called Amazon.com. They let regular users sell used books in exchange for a commission.
There is an open source, free portal program for university use called SINapse. You can find it here www.sinapse.org. It offers a book exchange module and its released under the GPL
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Instructional Resource Service
Honestly the infrastructure already exists, just substitute the word 'College' whereever you see the word 'Server' and Voila! it already works and is fairly cheap to use.
www.playerauctions.com
It has sort of an Everquest theme to it, but it would perfectly suit your needs. The biggest hassle, of course, would be making arrangements to make the purchase because you need to meet in person or mail them.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I just go to www.half.com and search the textbooks i need by ISBN number. It's easy and books are way cheap
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
Why not set up their own "library" instead?
a d. html
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/dlp/downlo
There is one started by a couple of guys at Iowa State University called Cheggpost
There is a great book exchange site available for Canadian Universities, check out http://www.canadabookswap.com. Cheers
Yeah, so...they're damn expensive new, and anyone can understand that. But you cannot deny that the book stores aren't making a killing on used books. I've had my book bought for $40 and then sold for $90, where the new price is $120.
Lets not forget the planned obsolescence - that is the habit of faculty of changing books regardless of whether they need it or not. I have heard some teachers fight tooth and nail to stay with a certain text where the administration wants to change to a new text so they can pump up book sales, and get that tidy back-end rebate from the publisher.
It's not just the books either - $4.00 for a pack of three-hole college rule notebook paper? It's $1.44 at Wal-Mart. And the college swank..."X University" on a Hanes Beefy-T should not cost $40.00.
Nobody is making this an attack against you personally, but don't sit there and try to justify the obvious price gouging that goes on in a book store, or shift the responsibility over to the publisher when the University is definately getting their kicks. Just because you clerked the college bookstore doesn't mean you know the economics behind the college book business.
In some of my economics classes in college, textbook prices was one of the common case studies -- apparently it's a topic near & dear to student's wallets :-)
It turns out that a big reason for the high prices for new textbooks is the thriving used book market: a new book typically sells for some price N, and three months later most students sell their books back to the store for perhaps 20% of N, and a month later the store turns around and sells the now used books alongside fresh new ones for maybe 70% of N.
The only winner here is the bookstore.
The publisher is getting screwed by the discount price on used books, so they have to jack up the retail price to maintain their margins.
The students are getting screwed by that inflated price on new books, and the only way they can recover any of their outlay is on the used market.
The bookstore on the other hand gets to sell the same goods twice, and the second time around it's almost all profit.
----
Break the cycle. Stop selling books back.
It's not like you even earn back enough to make it worthwhile, even on a strapped college student's budget. Personally, I found it more valuable to be able to refer back to some of the material from my beginning level textbooks when working on upper level course work, and I've referred back to some of that material from time to time since leaving school as well.
I hope to god that I never have to touch COBOL again, but just in case I ever do, I've still got a decent reference book on the language as a fallback... :-)
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I used to think that, if enough students were aware of the economic dynamics of thee textbook market, the situation might change for the better as students started opting out of the used market en masse. Now I'm not so sure.
I'm assuming that, in addition to the upward pressure on prices from the used market, the relatively easy accessibility of digital texts is likely to have an even greater impact. Even if warez copies of books on PDF are never as widespread as the used market, the very existence of free, easily accessible electronic versions from some offshore website seems likely to have an impact on prices here.
And so the cycle seems likely to go: as the publishers' margins slip, they raise the price; as the price goes up students work harder to find cheap or free alternatives.
I'm not sure what the right way to break this cycle is, but if a fair solution is ever found, be sure to let the various textbook publishing houses know.
----
For that matter, you might want to let the RIAA & MPAA know of any solutions to this vicious cycle also. I seem to remember hearing that they are at a complete & total loss as to handle much the same situation with their respective publishing industries...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
Using available open source software (PostNuke, PHP, Apache, and PnModules), this site has been able to create a simple way to exchange books.
Please don't kill it! It's on my server.
This
unfortunately, my university bookstore just rents space from the University (and presumably gives them a slice off the top). It is a private company that owns many many bookstores across the country (and even in Canada).
excepting that efollett goes belly-up and the university has to reassume responsibility for selling textbooks, I don't see any harm befalling schools like mine just because some students don't feel like shelling out $50.00 for a paperback book (deep links to individual titles not possible, for obvious reasons).
(*),
and she was born in a bottle-rocket 1929.
Cheggpost.com
I have used it myself many times, and have saved lots of money. I really despise our university bookstore, so I try not to go there as much as possible.
Otherwise, I buy my books online from Half.com or Ecampus.com.
Another free TextBook Exchange site is located at www.promises-kept.net
Maybe I can find that source code somewhere ..!
With eBay running Half.com and Amazon running their Marketplace, and a few others out there, I don't see the point of single-school online book exchanges. Sites like Half.com will have a larger selection, and (I suspect) cheaper prices for many items. When I was a student at Swarthmore College, I made a price-comparison website that allows students to search for their courses' texts just as they would at the College Bookstore's site, and lists prices from half a dozen websites. Swarthmore doesn't have nearly enough students to support a book exchange (and many courses are only offered every other year, so a book might only be required on campus once every four to six years), so I think my idea, to use existing online resources, was the right one for it and for other small schools.
And whatever happened to just posting a couple "book wanted" or "book for sale" signs near the campus bookstore?
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.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
check out cwrubookswap.com
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
It's slightly off-topic, but you should be aware that there are some online textbook catalogs that have been smoking made crack.
Case in point?
BookCentral.com, where you can get "Brand New Textbooks [at] Used prices".
Apparently, for them used prices mean offering books at 140-170% of list price.
Here's an example:
Flatland's list price is $30 (according to Amazon). BookCentral has it for a mere $43.02. Wow!
See? The campus bookstore isn't all that bad, really.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
There is one for Toronto here. You could always ask them what they use.
-- "Is this death or is this Ohio?"
it's called half.com
If no one has posted this already, I was talking to a guy last night who was starting up this business, it could be very helpful and is applicative to students everywhere.
This might look like a shameless plug for my website (which it is) but I believe that a Student Book Exchange is a very nice idea. It saves tons of money. I am a grad student at the University of Toledo and I have been trying to get people here to start using a website I have setup for just that purpose. If you would like to check it out, please visit http://dinki.mine.nu/tbe/ I like to call it the Toledo Book Exchange. I strongly encourage students from other Universities to setup their own.
Let me give you one big tip: Books with CDs are a big MFing ripoff.
Intro Anthro Brooks, Smith: New: 99.85, Used (No CD) 12.95
Go onto Amazon or Bigwords or your local used textbook store and buy the book without the stupid CD. Then find the one rich asshole who has brand new books and borrow his CD, copy, distribute!
I never bought a single book with CD in all of college, but I used all of the "additional CD materials."
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
If you take all of the books in and issue credits to contributors (or just set specific limits) and let people check them out for a term and return them. The central repository grows over time to include more books and eliminates freeloaders. It also prevents the situation where an English major has books to exchange, but only needs more English textbooks and other users have Physics books.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Here at CMU we have a newsgroup (aka bboard in on-campus terms) -- cmu.misc.market.books as well as cmu.misc.market.transit/music/software/etc. for on campus trading...
it's not what you're looking for but for one medium sized campus it works quite well.
Brian
bidfortextbooks.com was started with just that idea in mind. it's a student to student auction site that allows users to limit searching only to students at their school.
The main issue is that Professors and Class Departments should be more reasonable in their choice for books. These two groups rarely take in concern the price for the books or the fact that the student has to pay for books for 5 or 6 other classes as well. So they make us buy books that we may never completely go through, and come with a bunch of extra media that we never use. Like my Physics 101 book. Which actually covers Physics 101-103, which is a hard cover book with that holographic foil print, full color pictures and 2 CD oh who knows what, which cost $120 for a book that I only studied 1/3rd of. About 99% percent of the students taking will only need to take physics 101 so why not find a book that is smaller and cheaper for the majority of the students. This is the main problem far worse then the book store the book store is filling the needed book orders and has them available. It is the Departments and the Professors require these books that me never need to use.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm suprised no one has mentioned phpBE yet...
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
If you read the offer again you'll notice that he offers the job based on having the belief that he could do it in 1000 lines, not the actual ability or intention to do so.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
At least in colleges, I mean. If I had web versions of all of my texts I would be able to get around with much less of a load, have the text for reference, and keep the good ol' dust monkey at home for some serious infinite resolution text viewing.
I would enjoy it much, but oh well. Heck, I don't even have to buy my textbooks.
Many Thanks,
Luke
I did an installation of 0.4 not long ago and the install was very slick. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet but I was impressed enough with it to write up a little squib on my business site.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Sure, the bookstores are a business and they raise prices to make money; but unlike alot of other industries, they let you sell back your used textbooks at the end of term for as much as 75% of the original value. Can't do that with a pair of Nikes. I know what you're all saying, you tried to sell back your books and got bupkis for the one you paid $150 for because it wasn't being used the following term. Well, here are some tips--those books aren't just being used at your school, they get used all over the country and just about any bookstore will buy them back--shop around!
And another thing, never buy new--if you wait a week into classes, it's almost a guarantee that even the new-edition book will have been returned by some poor goof that bought it, wrote in it, and then decided to drop the class. His stupidity is your fortune.
Course, you could always do what I did--my first two years, I worked in a copy store (ahem, ahem); my last two years, I worked in the bookstore and convinced them to let me borrow my books if I promised extra nice to keep them in mint condition.
thanks much! I'll be sure to let you know if there are any changes I make to this. Probably going to use it to make sure my kids stay safe online, and who knows - might help keep the g/f honest too. 8-)
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
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