

Show HN: Book Cheaply - Don't buy textbooks you don't need (side project) - vital101

In short, Rate My Professor for books.<p>http://www.bookcheaply.com/<p>As a college student I bought many textbooks that I never used.  I could have saved significant amounts of money if I had some sort of website where I could find out if the book was necessary for my courses.  Out of that frustration, Book Cheaply was born.<p>I currently only have two schools, Grand Valley State University(GVSU) and Grand Rapids Community College(GRCC).  I'm already starting to rank pretty high on Google for queries like: &#60;instructor name&#62; gvsu, or &#60;instructor name&#62; &#60;some course&#62; gvsu, which makes me feel pretty good.  I also just got my first unsolicited reviews (4!) on Book Cheaply today.<p>That being said, my design is pretty bad.  I'm a developer with zero design chops, so I just tried to make how to use the site as obvious as possible.  It's also hosted on an underpowered shared vps on DreamHost.<p>Any feedback would be appreciated and I'd be happy to answer any questions.  Thanks!
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fabiandesimone
Love the site. One small thing:

The title says: “Save Money. Don't buy textbooks that you don't need” and
immediately after, there´s the search bar.

This is confusing because, generally, when a title is followed by a search or
button or whatever, the title tends to be the Call to Action to the following
element (in this case, the search bar).

Having said this, having a negative word: “Don´t...” tells me to NOT do
something when you clearly want me to search for something.

Hope this helps.

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codegeek
I agree. Instead, you can say something like "We help you buy books that you
really need" or "Buy textbooks that you need"

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will_brown
Having gone through undergrad and law school I can relate to both the high
cost of books and remember certain books that were never opened. Costing
sometimes $100 for a single student, savings really add up when your talking
about classes of 30, 50 or 100's of students.

I would have used this service if it was reliable, but if I ever had a bad
experience - book was needed- I might not return.

One thought, next to the amazon hard back offer a digital version for various
platforms (kindle, apple, android, ect...)

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vital101
I agreed about the rating reliability thing. I'm hoping that if I have enough
reviews for a given course+instructor that it will mitigate some of that risk.

Good idea on the digital version. I'm also going to be integrating with Chegg
soon for rentals.

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justhw
Great idea. Your design is pretty solid btw. Only problem might be your name.
It's not catchy, it sounds like a place to buy books cheap, when its a place
to find out if you need the book. Excellent execution and integration with
Amazon, you will be making money from day one even if its meager.

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materialhero
I agree. Without the description, I would have thought it was a site to book
cheap flights/travel. That being said, as a grad student myself and having
paid thousands out of pocket over the course of my educational career for
books, this looks like it will be a great resource. Come to UConn! BTW, your
layout looks great; don't worry about it!

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vital101
I'm hoping to start expanding to some of the larger/more popular schools
within the next few months. Thanks for checking it out!

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27182818284
Why not add way more schools to choose from? It is difficult to get 99% of
schools, but scraping the first 80% is pretty easy.

Great idea. Great start. Keep going with it.

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vital101
I'm trying to slowly scale up. Adding schools is easy enough, but I also need
to get all of their departments, their instructors, and their courses. All
this info can be gathered by scraping, but format varies greatly on a per
school basis. I also want to get reviewed seeded on a per school basis before
I move on to the next one. I allow the users to add most of that info, but the
more info they have to enter the higher the barrier to entering a book rating
is.

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eduardordm
Clickable: <http://www.bookcheaply.com> selecting url on tablets (specially on
the ipad) is hell.

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ramgorur
Should be very useful. AbeBooks (<http://www.abebooks.com/>) also offers
cheaper alternatives.

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vital101
Good find. They have an affiliate program so I'll look in to integrating with
them as well.

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eduardordm
Great idea, may I suggest that somehow, people could add links to free
resources that can, in a sense, replace the book.

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vital101
Are you suggesting an option to add a few different links to Wikipedia or a
similar resources that were used instead of the book? If I understand you
correctly, I like that idea a lot.

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eduardordm
Exactly, a lot of books are replaceable by freely available books, websites,
etc.

