As students invest this week in the textbooks they will need for the new semester, the number of book buying options continues to grow. Students have bought textbooks online in the past, but a new feature on the history department's website enables students to connect directly to Internet bookseller Amazon.com.
Students can access textbook listings with two clicks of the mouse, said Fergus Bremner, whose web development company, Extrafin, designed the new site. Students enter the number of a course and are taken to a list of the books they need. They can then click on a specific book and jump to an Amazon.com purchasing page.
"Books should be cheap and easy to come by," Bremner said, adding that his company designed the new website "like an application," rather than a series of pages to be read.
The website also makes listing textbooks easier for professors. "Professors are very technophobic," Bremner said. On his new website, "All they have to do is enter the ISBN numbers," he said.
The new website offers options to the history department and its students. Five percent of the money spent on textbook purchases on Amazon.com goes back to the department.
Bremner said he expects to develop similar websites to serve other departments, and that his next project is a languages server for Spanish and Portuguese. He added that he sees the website's textbook-buying option as another choice among other sources, such as the U-Store and Micawber Books.
"Most students who use them find that it's not worth the hassle in the end," said Virginia France, a manager at the U-Store, of online book vendors such as Amazon.com.
Students who change courses can easily return books without having to ship them back, France added. She also said that at the U-Store shopping can inspect used books before committing to buying them.
Neither France nor Bonnie Blader, a representative of Micawber Books, was bothered by the history department's new link to Amazon.com.
"Why not?" France said. "They can do whatever they want. Our goal is to have all the books for the students here, so they don't have to go all over the place."
"We're always aware that students are looking for bargains," Blader said.
Anastasia Frank '06 said she buys many textbooks online, because of lower prices and the quality of used books available, which are usually free of highlighting and other marks.
Frank also shops at the U-Store for books she needs right away.
Bremner said he expects students to continue to buy books from multiple sources. He sees the history department's new link to Amazon.com "as a supplement."
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