Dartmouth students frustrated by high textbook prices and deficient buyback policies may have an alternative to the College's traditional book merchants in the future.
Dogears.net -- a website that provides a marketplace for used textbook exchange on campus -- added a section for Dartmouth students last week.
The site allows students at Dartmouth to post descriptions of the textbooks they own, along with prices at which they would sell each book.
Potential buyers can then search a list of all textbook postings from students at the College, contacting possible sellers by BlitzMail.
Students who agree to a sale are expected to schedule a face-to-face meeting via BlitzMail to exchange money for textbooks.
Dogears also offers a facebook, event calendar, course guide, classified and chat features.
Dogears will compete with at least two existing textbook exchange sites at Dartmouth -- basement.dartmouth.edu and dartmoose.com -- neither of which has proved particularly popular on campus.
However, company officials speculated that their site's breadth of features will allow Dogears to succeed where previous sites have failed.
"If you offer a compelling service with features that your competitors don't, students will be drawn to that," said Andrew Arnold, Dogears' vice president of development. "Dogears brings everything together -- you can have a discussion with a person and then look at their profile on the same site."
Dartmouth undergraduates expressed some willingness to use a site like Dogears in an informal survey conducted by The Dartmouth, although most said they had not used competing locally-created sites for textbook exchange.
Laura Pearlstein '07 said she would "definitely use the site."
"I usually sell my books back to Wheelock Books, but it's a total rip-off," Pearlstein said.
"I mean, you'd sell a book back and get $1.50, which clearly is like three percent of what you paid for it, but it's better than having the books sitting on my shelf taking up space."
Mary Gribbon '06 also said she might use the site in coming terms, although she noted that she hasn't used the other sites for textbook exchange in the past.
A group of Columbia University undergraduates started Dogears in 2002 as a book exchange site within their college. The site reportedly caught on quickly at Columbia and is currently quite popular.
"I'm sure everyone at Columbia has used Dogears at least once," Columbia sophomore McClain Braswell said.
Braswell also said that the site is more widely used at Columbia for its textbook exchange feature than for anything else.
"I've used the listing of local businesses once. I've never used the facebook or the course guide," Braswell said.
Dogears expanded to offer services to additional colleges after its initial popularity at Columbia. Last week, the company expanded coverage again, adding 20 colleges to bring the total number of schools served to 40 around the nation.