As Textbook Formats Multiply, New Services Help Students Compare Options

August 20, 2011, 1:34 pm

Traditionally, students shopping for textbooks have faced a simple choice: buy new or buy used? But recently things have gotten complicated. Publishers now offer digital editions. Rental programs let students lease printed books. And Amazon recently opened a site that rents out digital editions that self-destruct at the end of the semester.

To help students sort through all those options—and compare prices—several new services have emerged that aggregate offerings from various retailers:

• This month Amazon released a free iPhone application called Amazon Student, designed to help students make price comparisons of textbooks sold by the online retailer. The app lets students use the iPhone’s camera to take a picture of a textbook’s bar code to pull up options for that title. Amazon hopes students shopping in the campus store will use that feature to stop and consider buying the book online instead.

• Several campus bookstores are fighting back against online retailers by offering their own price-comparison Web services—even though doing so risks directing students away from their own stores. Nearly 100 college bookstores have added the research feature to their Web sites with the help of a company called Verba, started by recent Harvard University graduates. Students enter the title of their textbook, and the tool displays prices for the book at the store, on Amazon, on Half.com, through a rental program, and via other options. Estella McCollum, director of KU Bookstores at the University of Kansas, which set up the service last year, said that she was nervous at first, but that in about 80 percent of the cases, students chose to buy from the bookstore rather than from an online competitor. The site tracks when students do choose alternatives and recommends price cuts to store managers. And when students do click through to the Amazon.com link, the bookstore at least makes a small commission for sending them. Knowing that students might use their smartphones to compare prices while walking through the store’s aisles, some campuses have even placed signs under each book reminding students about the online comparison tool (including a QR code that students can scan to take them right to information about a particular book).

• Two students at Yale University recently started their own textbook price-comparison Web site, called BookSavr.com, hoping to do for textbooks what Kayak and Orbitz have done for airline tickets—searching across providers to show many options in one place. The site shows prices at online retailers, the campus bookstore, and at other physical bookstores near the Yale campus. The students started the site just before spring semester, loading in the course information so students could easily locate the books they need and click through to a mix of options to buy them. Greg Hausheer, a senior at Yale who co-founded the service, said 60 percent of visitors to the site bought a book—with each sale giving the organizers of the site a commission of between 8 percent and 10 percent. Starting next spring, the students hope to open offshoots of the service for other colleges.

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mavprof

Mr Gitlin, it could also be the case that teachers’ union members promoting the protests are not so much acting in their collective role as educational professionals but more as organized self-interested parties in a political contest and what amounts to a labor dispute.
chuckkle

Can’t something like organized collective action involve BOTH self-interest AND an agenda to improve society overall? The anti-war movement on campuses in the 60s and 70s was partly motivated by the self-interest of possibly being drafted for many male students but also from the evolving political understanding that it was a military failure. Returning Vietnam vets added direct experience to the mix.
What’s happening in Wisconsin is far more than just a “labor dispute”–the teachers protesting are fully knowledgeable about what it’s like on the ground, in the classrooms, in the schools. The Governor and Republican legislators don’t speak from experience but from an abstract desire to smash unions.

Chuck Kleinhans
toddgitlin

I couldn’t agree more. Everyone is self-interested but not everyone is *only* self-interested. To call a fight over the abolition of collective bargaining rights a “labor dispute” is like calling the fight to overthrow Qaddafi a “political contest.”
mavprof

chuckkle, I didn’t pose an either/or dilemma but a suggestion of differential priorities the protesting teachers may have in their respective professional and political activities. I’ll leave aside your questionable example of Vietnam war protesters’ motivations, as a reply would be beside the present point.

But your final sentence contains two even more dubious assertions: first, that Wisconsin Republican state legislators have had no experience as teachers (a quick survey of their bios reveals several in fact do, as well as collective experience in a number of other honorable professions); second, after arguing for a more nuanced look at protesting teachers’ motivations in this political contest, you ascribe to the Governor and Republican legislators a monolithic motive to “smash unions,”–a reductively partisan claim befitting a protest placard rather than a discussion.

Mr Gitlin, my first response to chuckkle was also directed at your “*only*” claim if that was supposed to be a response to my first posting on possible differential professional and political priorities of the protesting teachers. And you well know the political contest in Wisconsin concerns restricting, not abolishing, collective bargaining privileges for some unions. Your last comparison as offered (the contest in Wisconsin is like the current bloody civil war in Libya in which rebels are fighting to overthrow a murderous deranged tyrant) simply makes no sense.
toddgitlin

I made use of an extravagant simile for a purpose I should spell out. When there are political differences, or contests, there are still ethical principles that ought to obtain. In an antipolitical culture like our own, we label “political” what we wish to degrade. The teachers, insisting on agreements previously made with the state in the course of collective bargaining, are upholding an ethical principle: stick by the deal you made.
mavprof

Thanks for your clarification of your simile, and I should add I didn’t mean to imply a pejorative connotation to the adjective “political” to either side in this contest. While I’d probably side with the new Governor’s and the new majority in the legislature’s view that altering collective bargaining agreements with Wisconsin public sector unions is within their scope and pertinent to their duties, I do recognize your point. Cheers,
marktropolis

Perhaps now is as good a time as any to remember the words of Ronald Reagan: “Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”

Never mind, he was talking about unions in Poland.

via http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/03/ronald-reagan-where-free-unions-and-collective-bargaining-are-forbidden-freedom-is-lost/
marktropolis

While I side with the unions (not probably) in this contest, it is “within their scope and pertinent to their duties” for the unions to protest the gov’s actions.
kolds

Good article, but don’t forget about the many alliances being made, often btw disparate types of people and organizations in Madison. The videos at the end of this entry:
http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/protests-debates-grace-under-pressure-in-madison-wi/
offer a quick glimpse of them. My sons’ teachers are active in the protests, but everyone (so far as I can tell) draws inspiration via the remarkable diversity of voices out there, all unsettled by a Governor’s agenda to create what he has deemed as a new ‘social contract’.
raza_khan

Greetings!
I was wondering if any one out there (facultly, administration) have added Verba or a similar feature into their college bookstore and any idea as to what students prefer. It would be intersting to see what the prices for the self-destructing books are that are offered on the semester. Ideally, the need to be substantially cheaper than the new or used books. Curious to see if they offer a year long as some science books are used for two semesters as well.

Raza
________________________________
Raza Khan, Ph.D.
Dr.Raza.Khan@Gmail.com
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RSRD4KFLLVQHEM4QYHLLFBQR6M chaz

Too bad most University bookstores won’t let students near the books anymore… University bookstores are too overpriced for our students anyway.

Tell your students to purchase books used online or at a local book store. Or they can get Amazon Prime free for a year and have free 2 day shipping.
http://twitter.com/JalouxdelaLune Christina LaVecchia

Actually, the Amazon Prime Student membership is now only 6 months long, unfortunately.

bigwords.com is another good aggregator.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1388178302 Dirk C. Fecho

Some college bookstores are set up like this, but not all. The reality is you can price shop on-line as they have to offer the course materials info on-line as part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2010. If the books are not available on-line they may be out of compliance.
chrisaldrich

It’s interesting to see sites like booksavr.com trying to compete in the space when there are a multitude of other similar sites like http://www.gettextbooks.com which have been competing in the book price comparison area for half a decade or more. Some, like gettextbooks, even include the shipping price for the book as well as gradations on the books’ reported conditions as well. Most operate on the affiliate model in which they take a small percentage referral fee for every sale. What additional value-adds are these new sites doing which differentiate them from the dozen or so others that are already out there?
http://twitter.com/JoVonLachey JoVon Lachey

Our students certainly need options. Books are extremely expensive at the campus bookstore. What about the student at the community college who is there on a Pell Grant? The parent of the student who was denied a PLUS loan? I advise students to weigh their options. My university tells us not to imply online purchases, but I do.
gadfly_jeff

Understandably, perhaps, the greater portion of the article and the comments so far have pertained to the economic burden of textbook costs. In that regard, the context is very much, only the current situation which is clearly very important. It might also be interesting though, if the “Textbook Formats Multiply” component of the article were developed, perhaps in comments and another article.

The visioning of digital textbooks for example, that are not direct analogues of text editions would enable the discussion to be broadened and informed by academic objectives and evidence based academic research, rather than being shaped solely by transactional economic cost arguments.

To cling to the image of a paper based or digital expression of a paper based textbook going forward as a constant is, I suggest, limiting the application of academic energy and creativity from developing new models to support the self directed learning components for tomorrows students; new models that may be more effective as learning aides, more economic locally and systemically, more socially equitable, and in the case of the younger students, better for their health as well.
http://www.facebook.com/jd.leonard JD Leonard

I created TextbookMadness.com with the goal of helping students save money. In addition to price comparison (including new, used, rental, and eBook options), we offer schools their own free textbook classifieds service. Please let me know what you think!
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