It seems that students across the country are complaining about the rising cost of textbooks. However, we believe that students who buy and sell their books online can pay less for their books than ever before. There is more and more competition with companies who want to buy those used books. The competition is so fierce, in fact, that you can often sell a book back for almost as much as you paid for it. We’d like to gather some data from real students who are currently in college. If you are a student, or know a student, please submit the following:
The following sites were the most popular in May and June 2010 according to the number of visitors sent from BookScouter. This is a good indication of which websites offered the highest prices during the month.
I had previously been running the mobile site and the iPhone application off of an older server. That server had some problems yesterday and the mobile site was down for some period of time until I got that fixed this morning. I have had plans to move those pieces over to the newer servers, but the problems from yesterday gave it the urgency needed to get that done. The good news is that the mobile site and iPhone apps now use the same infrastructure as the main websites which is more scalable and reliable. Additionally, some of the newer vendors which weren’t available on those platforms are now available as well.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused by those being inaccessible, but they should be working well now along with some other fixes that have been planned as well.
I’ve just finished adding Amazon.com’s Textbook Trade-in prices to the site. The service is pretty new, and I’ve not heard much feedback about it yet. Beware that they offer payment ONLY through Amazon.com gift cards. My understanding is that they pay credit directly to your account, so I don’t know if there is any way to sell the gift card and convert it to cash. I believe that the buyback program is actually run by a third-party and not by Amazon directly
One of our BookScouter Pro Tools is a Historic Buyback Price tool that allows you to analyze past book prices. This tool can be used to understand pricing trends for a given book or collection of books. It can assist you in determining the best time to sell your books. Here are a few examples:
This is probably the busiest week of the year for this site. BookScouter traffic has more than tripled since last year at this time. Last week I added an extra server to give the site some more capacity. I’m happy that all of the servers have been performing well! The problem now is all of the websites whose prices this site is searching are also getting stressed. It is their busiest time of the year as well, and some of them aren’t handling the added volume as well as others. That means that sometimes when BookScouter tries to look up prices on their sites, it goes really slowly. That in-turn causes prices to show up slower on BookScouter. I’ve tried to account for slow sites, and in general it does a good job, but I’m occasionally seeing issues where it still goes slowly. I’m investigating those more closely to see if I can prevent the cases that are still getting through.
I’ve just finished adding 5 new buyback sites in time for the busy season. More competition means higher prices for everybody. That brings the total number of vendors searchable on the site to 39, and 52 sites are available to have feedback submitted.
- MyBookCart.com
- BookStores.com
- Bookit Buyback
- FreeTextbooks.com
- TextbookRecycling.com
I’ve just added a few more new features to the site. Users now have the ability to create an account at BookScouter.com and customize the list of vendors that are searched. This should make it so that you only see the vendors that you’re actually interested in selling to. You can still click a link to view all of the vendors as well. If you are not logged in, then some of the most reliable sites are shown by default. I’ve also fixed a few problems that people have let me know about. We Buy Textbooks recently changed their site, so prices weren’t being displayed, and that has been corrected.
I’ve been working for a while on some significant changes to the website. The first thing you’ll notice is that the old template has been replaced with a much cleaner (and I think nicer looking) page. But the changes go much deeper than just a new template. I’ve completely reworked how most of the back-end systems work. The new design should allow for much greater flexibility and scalability. I’ll be able to add new websites quickly, and I’ll have the ability to work on some new tools for higher-volume users. The site should also load faster throughout. Every page should load quicker due to some HTML and CSS changes. I’ve also reconfigured some server settings to better take advantage of browser caching. The actual price comparison page should finish quicker as well. I’m using some different technology to make all of those lookups happen simultaneously.