Amazon.com attacks new and used textbook market | Hacker News Reader

Amazon.com attacks new and used textbook market

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33 pointscwan24 comments

I used to work in the "Merchant Technology" (third-party sellers) team at Amazon, and textbooks have been a very big part of that business for many years now.

The new thing here is the "Trade-In" program, which lets you ship your used textbooks to Amazon and get paid for all of them right away (instead of listing them and waiting for someone to buy them): http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=2205237011

My old boss is the manager of the Trade-In team, if anyone has any questions about it...

Interesting. I looked up a brand new book on Artificial Intelligence I paid around $90 for at my university's book store. Amazon is offering $10 to trade it in. I could get much more than that selling it to one of the buyers that set up out the back of trucks at the end of each term on campus.

Edit: I also looked up a linear algebra text I paid around the same for, and the trade-in value there was $43. Seems like there's a large variation even for latest edition text books.

My friend at Amazon writes, "We know that pricing isn’t as competitive as we want it. We are working hard with our book refurbishers to fix that."

did you use russell and norvig? 2e is $10, but the new 3e is worth $47.15.

It would be much better if there were a "trade-in" button on the textbook's description page. Instead, there is a restriction that the user has to search through the textbook portal page in order to see the trade-in button. I'm not sure why this restriction is in place, unless they wanted to limit the number of people using the option at first.

I'm told there are plans to add a trade-in button to the product detail page, but they were delayed first by a technical problem and then because of the holidays. (Amazon will not launch unproven changes during the critical holiday shopping season.) The change will go through A/B testing before general launch, of course.

Yes, how much money did you make at Amazon ? : D

I really hope someone, someday, can successfully cut the legs out from under the racket that is the textbook market. Forced bundles, superfluous editions that do little but change the page numbering, etc. I suspect a healthy enough used-textbook market could do this: As a teacher, if you know students can obtain an older edition easily, you could freeze the version of textbooks you use.

I don't know to what degree university politics would forbid using older versions, though.

http://industry.bnet.com/media/10003790/flat-world-knowledge... - Open source textbooks is another alternative - and a pretty exciting one at that.

It's pretty bad. Our goal is to take a completely different approach and allow students to transact amoungst themselves.

We let students rent their textbooks to other students. Students make and save money. http://www.textbookrevolt.com

We'll be launching http://www.textbookrevolt.com this weekend. I scoff at Amazon and Chegg :)

Peer to peer textbook rentals where students are the ones who save and make money.

I wish you great success.

FYI, on Chrome with a window size of 1280x800, the t-shirt image covers up the last word of your title. ("Cheap college textbook rentals just got [t-shirt]").

Thanks for the tip...there are some other display issues with Chrome. We'll be getting to those bugs post launch :).

Just for fun, I clicked on the link and looked for SICP. Amazon gave me a price of $115.44. If you look at the bottom, you'll see a link for the same book, only Amazon is selling it for $69.34!

What is the difference between the two? The links are:

$115.44 : http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...

$69.34 : http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...

Aside from price, the only difference that I can make out is that the cover for the more expensive version is a lighter shade of blue. What it looks like is that Amazon is charging a lot more if you buy SICP as a textbook rather than as a regular book.

they are by two different publishers (one is mcgraw-hill, the other by mit press).

IIRC, there were shortened versions of the books published as well---as some schools didn't cover all the material (cal didn't cover chapter 5), but both of these match the pagecount of my full 5 chapter copy. I think that it's just a difference of publisher.

Different editions and publishers, McGraw-Hill vs The MIT Press.

No, they're both the same book: both are second edition, with the same number of pages. Each page even has the same reviews (note reviews by Peter Norvig and pg). The only differences are the price and the ISBNs.

Indeed, as you note the ISBNs are different. The market is officially divided between the two publishers, one has US, the other the rest of the world.

As a side note it's all online and under a Create Commons license....

I didn't mean edition as in revision. It might be the exact same book, the barcode might be different or whatever. Amazon lists them the same way if you do a regular search.

I looked at the "computer science" section from the left menu, and the top of the list was The Great Gatsby.

That must be for the future financial engineers?

thats expensive ... i paid 30€ for my version ... new

I'm in a group of classes where all the students take the same group, an "integrated core" if you will. For the same 5 books, my classmates who went to our school's bookstore spent $450 +- $100. On Amazon, I got older editions of the same books for $130...

Yup this is similar to the cool thing that Chegg introduced after years of just facilitating student-to-student exchanges. I used to just sell to students directly (and usually could come very close to covering initial purchase price), but after graduating I had to turn to Chegg to sell my books. Prices weren't nearly as good as they were with direct selling, but they were much better than what the bookstore would offer.

The HUGE advantage to selling on Chegg instead of Amazon is that Chegg gives you REAL MONEY (in the form of a prepaid debit card). Some functionality on their site could be improved, but the fact that they give REAL MONEY gives them a big edge.

We're using a similar model but allowing students to rent their books to other students (get paid & retain ownership). In the long run we think we'll kick Chegg's butt. http://www.textbookrevolt.com/

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