As the first semester after the summer gets closer more news articles are covering the plight of the student and what they’re doing to avoid the high textbook cost.
Even if textbooks are not your specialty, it couldn’t hurt if you have a good source of textbooks that you can resell for less than the campus bookstore.
BookRouter, a central place to manage a number of book listing services (like AbeBooks, Amazon, Alibris, etc) has a good list of available places to list your inventory.
Even if you’re not interested in using BookRouter’s services, you can see use their list as a good reference point and comparison list for the available marketplaces out there.
I just read a post from RareBookNews.com stating that the University of Pennsylvania is going to start digitizing the rare books within their stacks. While their intent is to increase access and availability of the contents for scholars, I can’t help fearing for the value of an edition if it is easily read by anyone.
To read the post from Rare Book News, click here
This raises another issue, digitally delivered books. I think we all need to start thinking about how to avoid the same crash the movie and music industries have endured at the hands of file sharing.
While there are ways to try and secure our medium like developing anti scan printing techniques, the players in the movie and music industries who have been successful have embraced file sharing and altered their business models to fit.
You may want to start thinking how can you alter your business model to sell books digitally - and legitimately
