New Site Encourages Student Book Sales

By: Heather Murdock

Posted: 12/6/07

A new Web site that claims it can reduce the cost of textbooks for college students nationwide by creating competition for campus bookstores was launched early last week.

BookThief.com has made itself available to 3,200 schools, according to a press release, and it is designed to allow students to buy and sell books to each other on their individual campuses. For 99 cents, a student can post an ad to sell their used book. Buyers, who don't pay to read ads, can contact the seller directly to arrange a meeting to finish the deal.

The process works like the Facebook Marketplace, a site where users can post items like sports tickets for sale, and then meet to exchange cash for the item. Unlike on Facebook, however, the books are listed by subject, and it takes only a few minutes to find out if a specific book is for sale on campus.

The site also has sections to list other items for sale, housing classifieds and social events. At present, however, there are no items posted by UConn students.

Gary Chubb, who co-founded the site with Deborah Gray, said in a phone interview yesterday that he thought it would take three to six months for the site to "build a network of students that are tired of paying higher prices."

"Students are very, very open to this," Chubb said. "We think that they are looking for an alternative."

"If this has started, it's starting for a reason," said Mark Oliver, a graduate student working on his Ph.D. "I think UConn students are being a bit more savvy, and they are looking to things like this. Textbooks are expensive."

The cost of college textbooks tripled between 1986 and 2004, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report.

William P. Simpson, the president and general manager of the UConn Co-op, attributed the rise in prices partially to publishing companies printing longer and more colorful books with extra items like CD-ROMs included.

"The publishers claim that those things are demanded by the faculty and the students," Simpson said. "The faculty and the students that I talk to say they're not making those demands. I'm not quite sure where the truth lies."

Simpson doesn't expect BookThief.com to become a major competitor for the Co-op, but he said it's impossible to tell for sure.

"I wouldn't have predicted that MySpace would have worked, and it seems to be pretty successful," he said. "You never know until it comes out."

Simpson said that because the students who are selling books online are naturally going to try to get the highest price, he didn't think the cost of books would be substantially different for any length of time.

"Plus there's a convenience factor," he said. "They know if they come here, on a lot of their books they are going to get half the new-book price, and we're going to hand them cash. It's less of an 'iffy' thing."

"We've had student swaps in the past, and those haven't worked on a significant scale," Simpson said.

Tiffanie Itsou, a PhD. Student in American Literature and a 7th-year teacher in the freshman English program at UConn, was not as sure.

"I have a feeling that students will at least be checking it out," she said. "They are quite frustrated about how little they get at the Co-op when they sell their books back."

Itsou also said she believed that about 50 percent of her students are already buying books online from sellers like Amazon or Barnes & Noble to save money.

John Klimas, a 6th-semester electrical engineering major who spent about $350 on books this fall said he probably wouldn't use the Web site, even if it does become popular on campus.

"I'm more of an impulse buyer," Klimas said. "I'm looking for something that I can actually look at before buying."

He also said that he doesn't sell back books in his major, so he typically values quality over price.

"I'll pay the extra twenty dollars," Klimas said.

Klimas, however, said that many "students are already stretching it thin because they don't have any sort of budget," and has known people to opt out of purchasing required books to save money.

"I know lots of students who don't buy books when it comes down to 'I don't have enough to eat,'" Oliver added. "Then, if the library hasn't stocked up on those books, they'll share, or buy them together. I don't know how well that works."

Contact Heather Murdock at

Heather.Murdock@UConn.edu.