Remember Bigwords.com?

I received an interesting PR today saying that “Online Textbook Leader BIGWORDS.com Grows 21.5% in 2006.” Many of you may remember the irrational exuberance / tech bubble that helped generate myriad websites hoping to corner the online bookselling textbook market. When the bubble burst only the strong remained to truly compete for a sizable chunk of this market. Many of them you sell on today.

Bigwords is often cited as one of the archetypal examples of the irrational exuberance of the late 1990s tech bubble. After the company’s bankruptcy in 2002, one of the company’s original founders, Jeff Sherwood, managed to snag the domain from bankruptcy court and decided to organize and strategize anew.

Currently, Bigwords is a price search engine, a la Addall, that scours the top listings services and other sites to offer students the best textbook deal. The best part of the search engine is its ability to accept multiple books and search and research the sites to find not just the lowest prices for each book, but the best combination of purchases to make given shipping costs - genius! I’m glad to see Bigwords survive, and I am even happier to see it near DC (Annapolis according to PR). They are truly adding value to the online book buying proposition for students — an area we can still hope to grow significantly.

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Briefly Noted…

Miami Herald: Why aren’t e-textbooks selling?…

Joe Wikert on another e-book problem/opportunity…

Make your firewall more secure…

Considering Amazon, eBay stocks…

Very clear opinion on the attempts to close the internet tax loophole…

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Help Promote ChooseBooks

In my mind, if sales were equal, Biblio would be the most preferred place to do business for online booksellers. Close behind would be ZVAB/Choosebooks. These are the two sites that remain most committed to its independent booksellers. That said, both sorely need some help boosting their sales.  By the way, if you’re not with ChooseBooks, it is really one of those venues that you can add (especially if you use a third part to manage multiple sites) with little to no extra work.
Choosebooks is currently offering its sellers to opportunity to receive 6 rolls of packing tape and bookmarks to help promote the site. This is great opportunity for the site, sellers, and consumers.  Simply login to your sellers account and make the request.  I’ve already requested more of each and each time I received the package very quickly.

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