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: <instructor name> gvsu, or <instructor name> <some course> 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!
Love the site. One small thing:<p>The title says:
“Save Money. Don't buy textbooks that you don't need” and immediately after, there´s the search bar.<p>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).<p>Having said this, having a negative word: “Don´t...” tells me to NOT do something when you clearly want me to search for something.<p>Hope this helps.
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.<p>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.<p>One thought, next to the amazon hard back offer a digital version for various platforms (kindle, apple, android, ect...)
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.
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.<p>Great idea. Great start. Keep going with it.
Clickable: <a href="http://www.bookcheaply.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.bookcheaply.com</a> selecting url on tablets (specially on the ipad) is hell.