Show HN: Book Cheaply - Don't buy textbooks you don't need (side project)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874927

by vital101 • 14 years ago

14 18 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In short, Rate My Professor for books.

http://www.bookcheaply.com/

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.

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.

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.

Any feedback would be appreciated and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thanks!

justhw• 14 years ago

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.

gromi60• 14 years ago

Yeah, the design isn't bad at all.... the OP set expectations pretty low :)

materialhero• 14 years ago

I agree. Without the description, I would have thought it was a site to book cheap flights/travel. That being said, as a grad student myself and having paid thousands out of pocket over the course of my educational career for books, this looks like it will be a great resource. Come to UConn! BTW, your layout looks great; don't worry about it!

vital1017• 14 years ago

I'm hoping to start expanding to some of the larger/more popular schools within the next few months. Thanks for checking it out!

vital1017• 14 years ago

Thanks. I've been trying to think of some better names but haven't come up with any yet. I'd like to have something with 'book' in the title, but it's not deal breaker.

ramgorur• 14 years ago

Should be very useful. AbeBooks (http://www.abebooks.com/) also offers cheaper alternatives.

vital1017• 14 years ago

Good find. They have an affiliate program so I'll look in to integrating with them as well.

will_brown• 14 years ago

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.

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.

One thought, next to the amazon hard back offer a digital version for various platforms (kindle, apple, android, ect...)

vital1017• 14 years ago

I agreed about the rating reliability thing. I'm hoping that if I have enough reviews for a given course+instructor that it will mitigate some of that risk.

Good idea on the digital version. I'm also going to be integrating with Chegg soon for rentals.

fabiandesimone• 14 years ago

Love the site. One small thing:

The title says: “Save Money. Don't buy textbooks that you don't need” and immediately after, there´s the search bar.

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).

Having said this, having a negative word: “Don´t...” tells me to NOT do something when you clearly want me to search for something.

Hope this helps.

codegeek• 14 years ago

I agree. Instead, you can say something like "We help you buy books that you really need" or "Buy textbooks that you need"

vital1017• 14 years ago

This makes a lot of sense. I'll see about tweaking the wording to encourage more "doing" and less "don't-ing".

eduardordm3• 14 years ago

Clickable: http://www.bookcheaply.com selecting url on tablets (specially on the ipad) is hell.

eduardordm3• 14 years ago

Great idea, may I suggest that somehow, people could add links to free resources that can, in a sense, replace the book.

vital1017• 14 years ago

Are you suggesting an option to add a few different links to Wikipedia or a similar resources that were used instead of the book? If I understand you correctly, I like that idea a lot.

eduardordm3• 14 years ago

Exactly, a lot of books are replaceable by freely available books, websites, etc.

27182818284• 14 years ago

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.

Great idea. Great start. Keep going with it.

vital1017• 14 years ago

I'm trying to slowly scale up. Adding schools is easy enough, but I also need to get all of their departments, their instructors, and their courses. All this info can be gathered by scraping, but format varies greatly on a per school basis. I also want to get reviewed seeded on a per school basis before I move on to the next one. I allow the users to add most of that info, but the more info they have to enter the higher the barrier to entering a book rating is.

Show HN: Book Cheaply - Don't buy textbooks you don't need (side project)

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