Student Aims To Streamline Book Purchasing

With shopping period ending today, it's time to get serious about classes. One of the best ways to do this is to buy books (and maybe even start reading them).  Between bookstores, fellow students, and the internet, there are almost as many ways to purchase books as there are to shop classes.  By the time you visit the Coop to check prices, search for all your books individually on half.com or Amazon.com, and meet up with a random guy in your House to purchase his outdated Ec 10 book, you probably could have done your reading for the whole week (if you only had the books).

Eric J. Slingerland '14 wants to help ease this painful process. Collaborating with a friend at Yale, Slingerland spent the summer creating a website called books@harvard.

On Slingerland's site, the first step is to create your course list.  From there, the website generates a list of all the books you need for the classes you've selected. It displays bar graphs comparing the price of each book new or used on Amazon and at the Coop. From there, you can export the list to your Amazon account and buy (and if you've signed up for Amazon Prime with your .edu address, shipping might be free).

"I wanted to find a way to speed up the process and make it easy for people to buy from Amazon," said Slingerland.  "It's far more efficient than the Coop."

Books@harvard has already had over 200 visitors and has sold close to $6000 worth of books.  According to Slingerland, the website’s Yale counterpart has sold four times more books, a success that he attributes to greater publicity at Yale.  Slingerland and his friend have also expanded to 13 more schools beyond Harvard and Yale.

"I envision a huge portion of the student body using my website," said Slingerland. "I'm just so excited about the idea of this website and its potential."