August 26, 1999
LIBRARY / TEXTBOOK SOURCES
Buy the Book: Online Stores Vie for Students
By LISA GUERNSEY
sk
college students about buying textbooks, and don't be surprised if they
groan. The twice-yearly ritual usually means standing in line at the
campus bookstore with arms full of heavy books -- some of which sell for
as much as $100 each.
The resentment grows when students realize that most of their arm
loads will be a heavier burden at the
end of the semester, when they must
contemplate lugging the books to
their next apartment or trying to sell
them for a fraction of their price.
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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
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This year, online textbook sellers
are ready to capitalize on those hard
feelings. Some of them have opened
Web-based shops to give students an
alternative to campus bookstores.
Others are Internet offshoots of the
brick-and-mortar stores already in
place on campus.
""We are at the beginning of a massive sea change in the way college
students are -- and will be -- buying
textbooks,"" said Eric J. Kuhn, a co-founder of one of the textbook sites,
Varsitybooks.com.
The stores are now falling over
themselves to get students' attention.
Efollett.com, one of the largest
textbook sellers, recently began a
$10-million advertising campaign
with the slogan ""Get out of Line."" It
includes television advertisements
featuring penguins in single file
scooting along the ice. Ecampus
.com, an online bookshop that
opened this summer, has started a
$10-million promotional campaign as
well, including advertisements on
television, in Rolling Stone magazine
and on 8,100 movie screens around
the country. Varsitybooks.com, another competitor, recruits students
as campus representatives to spread
the gospel about its Web site.
Almost every online shop boasts
discounts, promising to provide a
better deal than students could ever
find off line. Textbooks.com, for example, offers a price of $80.80 for ""A
Primer for Calculus"" (Wadsworth),
$8.95 off the retail price, the company says. Finding discounts in the 40
to 50 percent range is much less likely, but some companies do feature a
few books with such price cuts.
There are important differences
among the many textbook shops. Students may like the convenience of being able to click a few buttons to order their books, but will they still
have the option of selling them back?
Not all sites offer this possibility.
""The ability to sell books back --
it's huge,"" said Fiona Smith, a recent
graduate of Columbia University.
""After you've taken a traumatic statistics class, the last thing you want
to do is keep that book.""
Whatever savings they find on the
Net, students should take shipping
costs into account. The discounts
may sound tempting, but does the
cost of mailing 20 pounds of chemistry books cancel out any savings?
And will the books arrive before that
first assignment is due? Students
buying online should never place an
order without checking a site's shipping information first.
Of course, just as things get crowded among online textbook shops,
other Internet-based methods of acquiring textbooks are appearing on the
horizon. Some students may find that they can get the best deals not by
visiting online bookstores but by participating in online auctions, like
www.studentauction.com, Campus24.com, and other
college-based auction sites. And publishers are starting to offer
digital textbooks that can simply be downloaded from the Internet. One spot
to search for digital textbooks is Wizeup, at www.wizeup.com,
which is developing online versions of books from Houghton Mifflin, W.
W. Norton and other publishers.
For now, the new online shops are focusing on the challenge of
balancing the efficiencies of running a huge centralized bookstore with
students' desires for customization.
Some students have been buying
one or two textbooks on Amazon.com
for years, but relying on their on-campus bookstores for their major
purchases because those stores organize their shelves by course lists
supplied by professors. The most serious online booksellers have tried
to replicate that convenience.
WWW.VARSITYBOOKS.COM
arsitybooks.com gets
points for shaking up the market. Last summer, the company unveiled its Web site to the surprise and consternation of some traditional college bookstores.
When the company's marketers
distributed advertisements on
George Washington University's
property last August, for example,
security officers ordered the marketers to move elsewhere -- a move
that attracted media attention and,
according to the company, drew
more students to its Web site.
Eric J. Kuhn and Tim Levy, two
entrepreneurs in their 20's, started
the company, which gets its books
from a large distributor in North
Carolina and offers discounts of up to
40 percent off retail prices.
Varsitybooks.com will probably be
most useful to students on the 300
campuses for which the site offers
course lists. Students at the University of Texas at Austin, for example,
would first click on the appropriate
region on the map of the United
States to find their university listing.
A click e takes them to a list of disciplines, then to a list of course titles,
and finally to a list of books.
The site also allows students to
search for books by title, author, or
the 10-digit international standard
book number or I.S.B.N.
The company offers a flat shipping
rate : $4.95 for U.P.S. second-day air
and $17.95 for U.P.S. next-day air.
(The deal may motivate roommates
to buy their books together.) If students don't receive books in the allotted time, Varsitybooks.com promises to refund the shipping charges.
The company does not offer students the ability to sell their books
back, nor does it sell used books.
Books can be returned within 30
days, however, for a full refund, not
including shipping costs.
BIGWORDS.COM
his
site comes with a bright
orange background and a 20-something attitude. One page
highlights an introductory calculus
book ""for your casual reading pleasure."" The company's chief executive,
Matt Johnson, is a 24-year-old college dropout who is trying to emulate
the Amazon.com model by going directly to publishers and distributors
to pull together books that students
order. The most popular books are
ordered ahead and held in a warehouse in Hebron, Ky.
Bigwords.com offers a search-by-school option for students looking for
course reading lists, which in most
cases are lists that professors have
sent to the site. But just searching by
title, author, or I.S.B.N. is probably
their best bet. The site offers savings
of up to 40 percent and urges buyers
to join its ""tell a friend"" program in
which students can earn rebates for
purchases made by people they have
referred.
The site offers free shipping if the
order is over $35 and the student
does not need it within the next few
days. For next-day delivery, the
price is $11.90 for the first book and
$1.95 for each additional book. Books
can be returned for refunds within 15
days.
WWW.COLLEGESTORE.COM
raditional
college stores
on campus don't want to miss
out on the E-commerce craze
-- nor do they want to lose business
to other online retailers.
So many of the stores have paid
the National Association of College
Stores to help them pull together
Web sites that can complement their
shops.
Check with your campus store to
find out whether it has made such arrangements. You can also head to
Collegestore.com.
The site offers a menu of colleges
that have created online storefronts
to work in conjunction with their on-campus stores.
ECAMPUS.COM
free
shipping is also the appeal
of Ecampus.com, an online
company started by Dave
Thomas, the founder of Wendy's restaurants, and nine other investors.
No minimum order is required to
take advantage of the free shipping
-- but if a customer needs a book in
two days or less, there is a price. The
cost is $10.95 for next-day delivery of
one book; $14.95 for next-day delivery of two or more. For two-day
delivery, the price drops to $7.95 and
$9.95 respectively.
Ecampus, like other online book
shops, is frantically collecting as
much information as possible about
specific courses at campuses and
adding it to its databases. To entice
colleges to send course lists, the company has offered them a commission
on books sold through the lists. More
than 80 colleges have signed up so
far.
If information is not available for a
student's campus, book searches can
be conducted by author, title,
keyword, or I.S.B.N. If books are
returned within 30 days, refunds are
offered. The site also sells used
books, buys books back (it includes
prepaid shipping label), and is set up
to run online auctions. The books
come from a 250,000 square-foot
warehouse in Lexington, Ky., where
Ecampus.com is based.
EFOLLETT.COM
he Follett Higher Education
Group manages bookstores for
about 600 colleges. Follett's online counterpart, efollett.com, is designed to be an online complement
to those stores. It also serves another
275 campuses that have made arrangements to provide Efollett.com
with the book lists for their courses.
Students can find books on the site by
conducting searches by course, by
university, by subject, or by title,
author, and I.S.B.N.
Customers can order used or new
books. If they are enrolled in one of
efollett's partner schools, they can
either have the books shipped or pick
them up at the campus store the next
day. ""online shopping is not going to
replace the traditional bookstore,""
said Tim Dorgan, the company's senior vice-president of e-commerce.
""It's an additive.""
For students who are not on a
campus with a partner bookstore,
books are shipped from Follett's
400,000 square-foot warehouse in
River Grove, Ill. Shipping prices
start at $3.95 for the first book
shipped within three to five days. The
prices go up 95 cents for each additional book. To receive the order
within two days, the cost is $8 more;
a next-day order costs $12.00 more.
To return books, students must
send them back or bring them to a
partner store within 15 days during
the regular school year and 7 during
summer terms.
The site gives students the option
of selling their ""gently used"" books.
Students are directed to the site's
Buy Back Locator to find the closest
store that will receive their books.
TEXTBOOKS.COM
o
to the textbooks.com site,
and you cannot miss its major
selling point: big red letters
scream savings of up to 50 percent.
The site, which opened earlier this
month, gets its books from a 200,000
square-foot warehouse in Columbia,
Mo., that is affiliated with Barnes
and Noble's college stores.
Textbooks.com does not organize
its offerings by course lists. It assumes that most students would
rather get the most updated reading
lists straight from their professors,
said Patrice Listfield, the company's
president. ""We're not convinced that
posting a booklist yet is the most
critical factor,"" Ms. Listfield said.
Students can search for used or
new books by author, title, I.S.B.N or
keywords. They may have to wait
several minutes for matches to appear, however. This week, at the
height of book-buying period, the site
was painfully slow in loading pages.
The site also lets students sell their
books back. Before you place an order, the site tells you how much
money it will return if the book is
sent back at the end of the semester.
The average buy-back offer is 45
percent of the selling price. The company even includes a pre-paid return
label with its orders, so that students
don't have to pay for the return shipping.
Textbooks.com also takes
straight returns, if the books are
returned within 14 days.
Shipping costs $4.95 regardless of
how many books are ordered; the
cost goes up for second-day and next-day orders. The site also offers a
further 10-percent discount to members of Student Advantage, a company that distributes identification
cards that enable students to get
discounts.
WWW.THEUZONE.COM
he U Zone opened last week as
a college Web portal that is
hoping to draw students in by
selling them textbooks at cost. In
other words, the site is like many of
today's Internet start-ups that seem
almost to brag about not making a
penny of profit. Matt Ogden, one of
the site's founders, expects the company to sustain itself through advertising and commission sales of other
student-oriented products.
The company has focused on gathering course lists from the 17 largest
public universities. Students who are
not at one of those schools should
search by title, author and I.S.B.N.
Shipping fees start at rate of $3.00,
plus 95 cents a book. For delivery
within two days, the cost is $8.00 and
$1.95 a book; for next-day delivery,
the cost is $12.00 and $2.95 a book.
Prepaid shipping labels are included
for students to return books.
Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.
www.studentauction.com
campus24.com
www.wizeup.com
www.varsitybooks.com
BIGWORDS
www.collegestore.com
ecampus.com
efollett.com
textbooks.com
The U Zone