KOI ANUNTA/YH

Barnes and Noble faces new competition, online

During last yearıs holiday season, as newspapers like the New York Times reported online sales that exceeded all predictions, the pioneer online retailer Amazon.Com, reported earnings that more than tripled those of the 1997 shopping season. This boom in Internet retail can be attributed in part to the growing number of people logging on, and also to new security measures that make is safer and easier to send your credit card across the Internet.

The online shopping trend has even extended to textbooks. Buying textbooks online offers the same advantages that online shopping in general provides. Students can avoid the long lines, waiting for bookstores to restock popular items, and the general mania of the textbook-buying rush. Here at Yale University, one group of students decided to take advantage of the online shopping boom, and create a service that makes it easier for students to order textbooks over the Internet.

Seth Brown, BR ı00, founded and now is the head of Bulldogbooks.com, a new website that lists the coursebooks for about 260 to 270 Yale classes. Each listing is a link to an order form at Amazon.Com for that particular item.

Brown came up with the idea for the site in December, as he was discussing the new student was discussing Democracy in America,the new student-led course offered this semester, and wondered how to get the books for the class, since it is not listed in the blue book, and therefore not ordered by the Yale Bookstore. Brown went to Amazon.Com to order the needed books when he discovered the online booksellerıs Associate Program. Through the Associates program, Bulldogbooks.Com can earn up to fifteen percent commission on each sale through the Bulldogbooks.com site.

According to Brown, the site serves two purposes. "I felt that the situation now is bad for book-buying," said Brown, citing the takeover of the Yale Bookstore by Barnes and Noble, a corporation "that doesnıt really give anything back to New Haven," according to Brown. Bulldogbooks, on the other hand, will donate a part of its earnings to literacy programs in New Haven. However, Brown stated that Bulldogbooks doesnıt aim "to take away from local businesses," like the Co-op and Bookhaven. At first, Brown listed mainly books that are also available at Barnes and Nobleıs Yale Bookstore. However, as courses were added, books at Bookhaven and the Co-op also became available on Bulldogbooks.com.

To find out what books were on order at the Yale Bookstore and also to get the course readings, Brown began calling professors over winter break, and collecting course reading lists. In this manner, Brown was able to collect about 260-270 classes worth of books. Once the site was put up, students could email courses@bulldogbooks.com with requests to list other classes. In addition, you can use bulldogbooks.com to search Amazon.Com's database for other books.

Meanwhile, the professors, including Profs. Rogers Smith and Lee Blackwood that Brown contacted then let their classes know that the books could be ordered on Bulldogbooks.Com. One student in Lee Blackwood's class noted that Blackwood "didn't really know what the site was about."

However, Bulldogbooks isn't the only source for Yale textbooks on the Internet. For the serious online textbook shopper, there are a number of websites like Varsitybooks.com, Bigwords.Com and Buybooks. Some of these sites offer some savings from the prices that Bulldogbooks.com offers. For example, the textbook for Economics 116b, Principles of Macroeconomics, is $58.67 at Bulldogbooks, which is the publisherıs list price. Bigwords.com offers the same book at a slightly lower $51.17. Of course, the best way to find bargains online for textbooks is to take down the ISBN number, and then search at a number of retailers.

The Yale Herald Online has compiled a number of booksellers into a Booksearch page where you can investigate the new trend of online shopping—for textbooks—for yourself.
—Kushal Dave contributed to the article

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