August 26, 1999

LIBRARY / TEXTBOOK SOURCES

Buy the Book: Online Stores Vie for Students

By LISA GUERNSEY

Ask 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.



Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

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

Varsitybooks.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

This 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

Traditional 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

Ffree 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

The 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

Go 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

The 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.


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