

Show HN: BookTurf, college textbook marketplace - okhudeira
http://bookturf.com

======
minimaxir
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.

~~~
okhudeira
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.

~~~
andreasklinger
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.

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brokentone
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

~~~
okhudeira
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

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sritch
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.

~~~
okhudeira
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

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imurray
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.

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podperson
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.

~~~
okhudeira
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.

~~~
podperson
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.

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lukethomas
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.

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marizmelo
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>

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okhudeira
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.

~~~
PhrosTT
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.

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

~~~
okhudeira
I currently only have US colleges/universities.

~~~
guptaneil
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>

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rxoo2
Very cool, how did you get the list of all the school names? Very impressive
as a student myself.

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

