All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
"1984 meets Radiohead meets Sony PlayStation" is how creative director Leri Greer describes BigWords.com, one of two Web start-ups outsprinting Barnes & Noble in the race to become the Amazon of college textbook sales. In an industry born of compulsion, an Orwell allusion is not off-base.
For decades, academic booksellers have held a position any retailer would envy, pitching must-buy items to captive consumers. By owning nearly a third of the estimated 3,800 college bookstores in the country between them, Barnes & Noble College Bookstores Inc. and the 126-year-old Follett Corporation have been assured the lion's share of the $3 billion-a-year US textbook business.
The explosive debuts of upstarts BigWords and VarsityBooks.com facing off against Barnes & Noble's textbooks.com and efollett.com, however, are indicative of sea changes that will wash out that cozy beachhead. Both BigWords and VarsityBooks.com flaunt their independence from the "brick and mortar" industry, trading off student frustration about waiting in line at the bookstore. efollett.com is clearly a defensive play, pumping up offline sales by giving stores an online interface.
Though an estimated 95 percent of college students use the Net, less than a quarter of the independent bookstores on campus have any kind of Web presence - and less than 200 of those sites actually sell books online. Into that breach charged BigWords and VarsityBooks.com, beating textbooks.com to the Web by six months. The entrenched players are still struggling to catch up.
VarsityBooks.com was born in a moment of frustration, says cofounder Eric Kuhn. As a law student at George Washington University, he says, "I got sick of waiting in those ridiculously long lines, feeling completely powerless." Kuhn claims that a third of his customers make their first online purchase on his site.
Like Amazon, VarsityBooks.com builds buzz by trumpeting discounts of up to 40 percent. Most of the titles on the site, however, are discounted at half that rate at most.
It pays to comparison shop. If you're a geek-in-training at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, the one required text for Intro to Computer Science will cost you $66 at VarsityBooks.com. At efollett.com, you can buy the same book for $46, $35 used. All of the sites except for VarsityBooks.com offer used books, and BigWords and textbooks.com buy back new books at the end of the semester for a percentage, as traditional college bookstores do.
Both VarsityBooks.com and efollett.com allow students to pull up lists of required and optional texts by plugging in the school and the name of the course - a feature that will inevitably become standard. Compared to an on-the-ground store's booklists, however, these lists can be incomplete or out of date, increasing returns and other hassles. Convincing instructors to generate lists on a site themselves could give an online player the decisive edge, suggests Forrester Research senior analyst James McQuivey.
Like most Barnes & Noble-owned stores - such as the Harvard Coop - textbooks.com doesn't advertise its status as a satellite of the corporate mothership. An overweeningly chummy FAQ informs the reader who wants to know who's behind the site, "We're textbooks.com! [Best if read aloud in a late-show announcer type voice.] We're just a bunch of folks who want to make the process of buying textbooks a lot less painful." Says VP of merchandise marketing Jade Roth, "We're very interested in getting the product out there, not the Barnes & Noble brand name."
Follett's strategy to shore up its brick-and-mortar constituency is to erase the distinction between in-store and online purchases altogether. Students can reserve texts on the campus bookshop's Web site, and in many cases, filled orders can be picked up at the store an hour later. "We're tying the bricks to the bytes, which allows the bookstores to not be disintermediated," effuses Jim Baumann, president of Follett's Higher Education Group. Bundling bricks and bytes, however, can be a drag on ecommerce. The primary efollett.com URL is little more than a national brand name pasted over a network of individual sites, with the book prices themselves buried many clicks deep.
Of the four sites, the one that speaks to kids in their own language without sounding like dad doing Maynard Gen-X Krebs is BigWords - not surprising, given that CEO Matt Johnson is 24. Unlike VarsityBooks.com, which relies on a single distributor, BigWords has recast the textbook supply chain for ecommerce, rallying 500-plus publishers and suppliers behind its service. As efollett.com revs up a $10 million TV ad blitz for August, BigWords boasts a "Tell A Friend" program giving discounts to students whose buddies buy books on the site and word of mouth that's bringing in orders from the Czech Republic and Azerbaijan.
Score one for the great leveler. "Everybody's on an even playing field now," Barnes & Noble's Roth concedes. "The battle will be fought this fall."
