Show HN: BookTurf, college textbook marketplace | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BookTurf, college textbook marketplace

bookturf.com

23 pointsokhudeira20 comments

I've seen these type of startups (Book P2P) pop up every semester when I was in college, and I have a genuine question: are these kinds of startups actually sustainable?

a) both supply and demand are seasonal (very, very few people trade books in the middle of a semester)

b) Amazon's/Chegg's prices for college textbooks are good enough that they can be purchased and later resold back to them for a decent amount of money, which can outweigh the inconveince factor of scouring a book-trading service for that one book you need. (and as a college student, you need all the time you can get)

c) Chicken-and-egg problem taken to the extreme. No one buys books until there are sellers, no one sells books until there are buyers.

This is a common startup idea with many attempts at solving the problem. Is it sustainable? Maybe as a side venture.

a) Agreed.

b) "good enough" is subjective. College students have very low budgets: if I can get it for cheaper, I'll try and keep trying.

c) Absolutely the toughest nut to crack.

Ad C) double-in on the "Ask your friends"

* Add a fb share button

* Give people the url to share in fb groups

* Fix the tweet button not to have the @bookturf in the beginning of the tweet but in the end

Ad-2 c) You could niche on a few colleges to begin with. Look for fb groups that are already handling this topic.

It's not a new or original idea, but with the right hook it might just work well... I created a site like this some years ago for my school: http://shelfswap.com/

The challenges are getting adoption at a school. We hit a lot of interesting ideas around it...

1. Obviously the best times to facilitate these transactions are between sessions with short breaks (e.g. fall to spring, vs spring to fall, separated by summer). We were on the semester system, so we only get 50% of sessions to have such a gap... vs if you were on a trimester or quarter system, you would have 66-75% sessions this way.

2. Some students (sellers) immediately saw the appeal "oh, I can get a lot more money for my books, I just have to hold them a little longer?" others did not "I don't care how much I get, I just want to get rid of them" (which is why college bookstores are able to cheat these people). The buyers were less difficult to convince.

3. There were battles at my school to get it allowed... yes we had to check, word of mouth wasn't enough, we needed to put up ads. Luckily I was already in good with our school executives, so they went to bat for me against the bookstore.

4. The bookstore was very upset about it, but I do believe we spurred them to give better prices, have better advertising, and an easier system the years following this project -- helping the consumer.

I eventually walked away because my "non technical cofounder" started doing stuff behind my back, contributed very little, yet he got upset at me in my senior year not doing more work on it. Really, it's my fault. I should have known that he wasn't actually bringing any useful skills to the table ahead of time--enthusiasm isn't a skill.

edit: formatting

Agreed, this has been done many times but it never stuck.

I started this website a few years ago while in college and faced similar challenges. As someone mentioned in another comment "chicken and egg problem to the extreme."

In my experience, students already reach out to their friends/classmates to solicite cheaper textbook pricing, a website would be a good medium to facilitate this and helps avoid the many listserv emails asking for books.

One thing I've tried my best to do is to lower the barrier to post a book for sale and communicate with sellers: there are no sign ups required and I've opted for non-captcha spam validation (for now) -- this is to help with the adoption.

Edit: spelling

I think one of the most important things you need to handle is the empty results page. Don't have your users reaching a dead-end, especially right now since you have a small user-base. You should continue the experience for the user, possibly by providing them with a link to where they can buy it themselves (be it on Amazon or Chegg) and maybe throw in an affiliate link if you're set on earning money.

I have the code that pulls up Amazon pricing/links commented out. I initially had it for the exact reason you mentioned (to avoid dead ends) but figured it might give users a bad impression of the website, after all, BookTurf is supposed to be an alternative to Amazon (and the book store).

Edit: spelling

A UK version (~1 year old, and in use): http://bookadopter.com/

I notice that bookadopter makes it easier to quickly see which books are available for your school/department. And by easier, I mean I can actually find some books to buy. It doesn't have the thumbnail images or ISBN search though.

It seems to me that the obvious way to fix college textbooks is for professors to create new electronic versions -- alone or collaboratively, free or non-free -- and let the market decide. What's clearly broken here is the "buy this and we'll make it out-of-date or hook it to a one-use set of online tools" model.

The linear algebra course I took used a free book (I believe it was http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/) which students could buy for cost of binding or freely download.

As long as book publishers are involved with universities and professors, there will be a problem.

Certainly the current corrupt system of publishers who give free samples blah blah blah is totally screwed up. But there's certainly room for a "thin" publishing layer like iBooks, Lulu, Nook, KDP, etc. where the only thing the "publisher" does is free the authors from dealing with the nuts and bolts of ecommerce.

I just created something very similar for my school: http://www.youmainebooks.com/

It works VERY well on a small scale, but with multiple schools, it gets pretty tricky.

I did one with a friend while in DeAnza College, it was made for that specific college. But as people pointed out, its seasonal. http://zepply.com

I would love to get some input on the design of the website. It went through many iterations and as a non-designer (read technical guy), I'm always looking for criticisms on my design.

I like it. It's a very clean infographic explaining it and the search engine is fast.

Obviously if you get any traction it could use some branding (pretty logo)... but that's sometimes a distraction from making the site work.

I've been toying with this exact idea and started some ground work on developing an iPhone version of this. Is this USA only?

I currently only have US colleges/universities.

Just curious, where did you source this data from? I'm working on a student planner[1] that's currently limited to .edu emails, and we used a CSV file from the DoE, but I'm always curious if there are other sources for this data too.

[1]: http://tabuleapp.com

Very cool, how did you get the list of all the school names? Very impressive as a student myself.

I think you should create some affiliate incentives to help spread the word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com