Colleges Turn to Online Bookstores
from the changing-world dept
Seems that some colleges are looking to replace their entire bookstores by switching to online alternatives. Apparently that's what Georgetown and some other colleges are doing. Seems like a smart idea to me. Of course I always thought that there should be some sort of setup for students to sell each other (or swap) used books rather than having to sell back used books at 1/10 the value they could get anywhere else in the world, just so the bookstore could mark them up to 9/10 the price of the new book.
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Swapping college texts
About your comment that studnts should be able to sell books to each other, instead of being taken by the bookstore's cheap buy-back prices - Well, a few years back when I was attending WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) some friends of mine wrote such a system. It was text based - this was 1994 or so, just as the web started to explode, and would allow students to list books for sale, and search the DB of those listed for books they needed. Then they could contact the seller and make the buy.
It got some use, but as far as I know, once we all graduated and left WPI no one maintained it. In this day and age I would expect there to be students at most schools who could handle this. It would be much easier to write a web form and a CGI to keep the DB - say Perl and MySQL - than to write a C-code application that uses VT100 text menus.
-MZ
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