Slashdot Mirror
We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?
Hugh Pickens writes "Using Netflix as a business model, Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra founded Chegg, shorthand for 'chicken and egg,' to gather books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. Chegg began renting books in 2007, before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Rashid's American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system. 'People thought we were crazy,' Rashid said. Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company's revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million, and this year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone."
Editions.
Not all schools are as liberal with their policies as your school. Where I was students weren't allowed to remove library copies of the textbook from the building.
You mean just like we look now at drug/substance prohibition? The way we learned our lesson that it's never going to work no matter how hard we try because the very idea represents a total failure to comprehend the situation? The way it's a hypocritical position which has done a great deal of harm in the name of justice? I'm glad nothing like that goes on today... Oh.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The whole textbook market is a scam to rip off students. The vendors keep churning the book versions simply just to keep saturation low (why do we need 17 editions of an algebra book?).
At one point, I had purchased a marketing book only to find that a new version had come out right at the beginning of the semester. The prof apologized for the problem and handed out an addendum for the students with the early edition. The only changes were to the end-of-chapter quiz questions. And most of those questions remained the same - just with the question numbering changed slightly.
They weren't even trying to be creative with the fact that they were screwing the students. Everyone knew this to be the case and accepted it. I think that I was the only person who was upset by this obvious racket.
Is this what we should expect for everything from now on? If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks. These textbooks would cost nothing. Certainly, there would still be a need for private market textbooks (on arcane and/or rapidly changing subjects) but I can see a substantial portion of textbook requirements displaced by an open system.