I've seen these type of startups (Book P2P) pop up <i>every</i> semester when I was in college, and I have a genuine question: are these kinds of startups actually sustainable?<p>a) both supply and demand are seasonal (very, very few people trade books in the <i>middle</i> of a semester)<p>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)<p>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.
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: <a href="http://shelfswap.com/" rel="nofollow">http://shelfswap.com/</a><p>The challenges are getting adoption at a school. We hit a lot of interesting ideas around it...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>edit: formatting
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.
A UK version (~1 year old, and in use): <a href="http://bookadopter.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bookadopter.com/</a><p>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.
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.
I just created something very similar for my school: <a href="http://www.youmainebooks.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.youmainebooks.com/</a><p>It works VERY well on a small scale, but with multiple schools, it gets pretty tricky.
I did one with a friend while in DeAnza College, it was made for that specific college. But as people pointed out, its seasonal.
<a href="http://zepply.com" rel="nofollow">http://zepply.com</a>
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.