Dormbooks

DormBooks, a student-led initiative, offers a practical solution to overpriced textbooks for college students. DormBooks eliminates operating costs and inefficiencies in the current business model, allowing for higher buyback prices, lower sales prices, and better customer service. Because the business is run by students in the target market, DormBooks is uniquely situated to recognize changing customer needs and capitalize on market opportunities. To make a profit, publishers constantly produce new but only slightly different editions of textbooks, and campus bookstores take advantage of their market power by charging high prices. These practices create a self-propagating cycle in which high textbook prices drive an expansion of the used-textbook market, which drives new-textbook prices even higher since publishers need to recoup their expenses over a smaller volume of new textbooks sold. This again causes an increase in the demand for used textbooks, so that the more used-textbook retailers like DormBooks operate, the more customers demand used textbooks. DormBooks combines the savings of online textbook marketplaces with the proximity of a campus bookstore. By having a localized inventory of low-cost, used textbooks, DormBooks becomes the place students look to for the cheapest, most convenient textbooks.