Textbook Rentals Big Business - Kleiner Perkins Goes After Chegg | Hacker News Reader

Textbook Rentals Big Business - Kleiner Perkins Goes After Chegg

techcrunch.com

24 pointsqhoxie11 comments

these guys were our early boso.com competitors

Yeah, they've been around quite a while. I remember them starting to acquire book-selling companies right around when me and a few friends had a really popular one starting at MIT. We abandoned that space 'cause it looked like there was no money in it. I'm doubly impressed, though, since 1) they stuck around and 2) they actually managed to run into a really sick business model. Maybe pg was right about startups succeeding by not dying...

there are a lot of aspects to the college experience that haven't made it into the 21st century. lots of business opportunities.

Other than textbooks, what did you have in mind?

There doesn't seem to be a good classifieds system for campuses. Facebook isn't too helpful, neither is craigslist.

My college actually maintained its own service, but it wasn't super-clever and sort of backwards compared to a webapp. You would submit an email to them and they would include your post in a weekly email that went out to everyone on campus.

Pretty much every college (or every technical one at least) has a homegrown system or three.

From what I've seen, most students just use Craigslist. I don't see the problem with it.

Craigslist is alright, but it would be nice if you could share things more easily, say with people you know from college/uni. Which is why Facebook should be a good place for ads, but 99% of people I've seen use it just for fun. Those are the problems I have with each of those.

Craigslist works well for colleges with small towns. Thus the load on the classifieds stays low enough to keep track of. Bored students can then just surf the for sale section. In bigger cities it stops working so well, but really, college students mostly have crap, so I wouldn't buy from them anyway. I like to buy from yuppies who are getting rid of their sorta-used couch to get a new better one. They practically give it away.

Good idea ... buy/sell, housing, and rideshare especially

Do you think it would work best if it was walled off? For example, if an @myschool.edu address was required to sign-up/access (similar to what yammer does).

Their books are still expensive. College student should buy international versions for around $20. Abebooks.com has tons of them.

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