Friday, November 24, 2006

College Professor's Desired Experience

My cousin is a college professor, and I asked for her opinion yesterday when at her mother's house for Thanksgiving. I explained our mission:

Develop a Web site for the College Text Book Market. The site will provide services designed to buy/sell college text books in the US market. Your target market is college students and professors. You must be able to purchase and sell books on the site.

I asked her what was important from a professor's point of view. She said that text book companies used to send the professors a lot of free sample text books, but found that most of them never got used or returned. She said the companies are now being more selective. For example, they will send a free sample book, but if you don't adopt it, they want you to send it back.

She said that if she were going to use an online site, she would want to see searchable text. She would also want to be able to view the content of the text book online. She said she would probably not be interested in ordering a book for further evaluation if she couldn't at least get an idea of the content first.

She also said that some sites will allow you to have a password to preview for a certain period of time only. They don't want people downloading the entire book, as the point is to SELL text books, not give away the content for free.

I will try to get other opinions if I can. My neighbors are college professors, as well. Not sure if they are home this weekend

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2 Comments:

At 24 November, 2006 18:06 , Blogger David said...

Sounds like your cousin provided some good insights. The more I think about this website the more it makes me think that it would be something like a hybrid between wikibooks and an online retailer. From the standpoint of providing teachers with textbooks, I'm more for the limited-time only (say a week) online access concept rather than the older approach. You can't help but save money by not shipping out textbooks that you may or may not get returned.

D

 
At 25 November, 2006 21:16 , Blogger Graciela said...

i'm glad that we have insider information that helps us make better business decisions! thanks for all your hard work cindy!

 

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