Many college students have discovered that online booksellers, such as Amazon, offer textbooks at cheaper prices than the campus bookstore. But the Harvard Coop, the famous and huge bookstore in Harvard Square, apparently feels threatened by this, according to an article published yesterday in the The Harvard Crimson.
The article says a Coop employee told a Harvard junior to leave the bookstore after he wrote down the prices for six social-science books. The Crimson speculates that the Coop is frustrated because undergraduates who operate Crimson Reading, a Web site that encourages comparison shopping from online booksellers, are going to the Coop to write down identification numbers for books. The numbers are then plugged into Crimson Reading’s database.
The Coop’s president, Jerry P. Murphy, is quoted as saying “We discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.” He also asserts that book-identification numbers are the Coop’s intellectual property.—-Andrea L. Foster
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