Web developers unleash code in hopes that students will take on bookstores
Web developers unleash code in hopes that students will take on bookstores

			College students lauded the release of TextYard's code.
The creators of a popular online textbook service are arming college students with open source code that might give rise to low-cost textbook sites and create competition for campus bookstores.
Ben Greenberg and Rui Xia, co-founders of the site TextYard, announced Feb. 14 that they are moving on to another project, and that their last action at TextYard would be making their code open source – a move that large bookstores are expected to combat with new security methods.
Making the code public means even students with “rudimentary coding skills” can create their own online textbook stores that pose a challenge to campus bookstores, TextYard said in an announcement.
The TextYard duo used “scrapers” – internet extraction programs that pulled information from bookstores’ websites – to compile the best prices for college textbooks that can cost as much as $400 apiece. The code to those college bookstore scrapers is now available for anyone who wants to build their own version of TextYard at their school, bringing together book options from retailers, book rental sites, and student sellers.
“It’s a Johnny Appleseed thing, trying to get everyone to start their own site and completely take down this monopoly that the [campus] bookstores have,” said Greenberg, who started TextYard as an Indiana University (IU) student in 2008. “I think of the textbook industry as a broken system and an out of date business model that is afraid of new technology. … You’re going to see a real change because instead of building up our own solution, we’re giving people the framework to create their own.”
TextYard, along with sites like SwoopThat and SlugBooks, has made searches for good deals on textbooks more convenient for students who once had to peruse a dozen or more websites individually, hoping to find a low-price option. All of these sites use web scraping to compile the book information.
Greenberg said scraping for textbook information has proven reliable because almost every campus bookstore in the country uses one of six online storefront systems, leaving little guesswork for programmers who run operations like TextYard, which has textbooks for students at more than 1,000 campuses.
Open sourcing the code that allows for scraping of major bookstore sites could be a blow to stores that have agreements with colleges and universities, the TextYard cofounders said.
“College bookstores dominate the textbook market because of their monopoly on the course-to-book data – they are the only ones with a database of which books go with which courses,” Greenberg wrote in a blog post.
Within an hour of TextYard making its code available online, Srini Kadamati, a junior at the University of Texas (UT) Austin, had examined the code and said it would save him more than a month of programming for a low-cost textbook site he’s building for UT Austin students.

“This will significantly speed it up because we would have to go and figure it out ourselves,” Kadamati said of the complex compiling of books for courses at UT Austin.
Before TextYard’s code release, Kadamati said he hoped to launch Semiproductive.com by the end of April. Now, he’s hoping to make the textbook site live at the beginning of March.
Advocates for web scraping argue that the practice is legal for a range of reasons.
The practice is deemed illegal when the web scraper is damaging a company’s servers or affecting its business in some way. Greenberg said TextYard’s methods don’t disrupt a bookstore’s web service.
Many websites don’t include any provisions on web scraping in terms of service agreements listed on the site. And the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) calls for course-book information to be made freely available to all bookstores and students.
Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the National Association of College Stores (NACS), said web scraping is not “inherently illegal,” but that college stores that have placed restrictions on scraping and data mining in terms of service agreements could take legal action.
College bookstores have remained the most popular place for book purchases, Schmidt said, because students know the stores are more reliable than textbook websites.
“College stores do not dominate the textbook market merely because of the adoption information they have, but because they are the best, most convenient, safest place for students to purchase or rent their textbooks,” he said. “Only the college store guarantees it will have the exact course materials a student needs for a course.”
TextYard’s open source announcement comes as the NACS questions the true price of college books in materials.
Reports published last year by the Student Public Research Interest Groups (PIRGs) estimated textbook costs to be more than $1,000 a year. NACS charges that those numbers are exaggerated, and the true number is around $650 annually.
An 2011 NACS report said that book costs have actually dropped since 2007 due in part to “the meteoric rise in the number of college stores offering the textbook rental option.”
SwoopThat lets college students search many of the most popular websites – including Chegg.com, BookRenter.com and Amazon — for low-cost textbooks by simply plugging in their course schedules.

Once the student enters his or her courses for the coming semester, SwoopThat generates a list of every book needed for each class, along with every online textbook service that offers those textbooks at a discount.
SwoopThat, which searches more than 15 million textbooks, has matched books to courses at 380 colleges, universities, and private schools.
Using SwoopThat, a student can find cheap books for every one of their classes in 10 minutes, saving up to 75 percent, said Jonathan Simkin, the company’s CEO and a 2010 graduate from Harvey Mudd College in California.
“What we want to do is open up the market for students and increase price transparency,” Simkin said. “We don’t care about making the maximum amount of money necessarily; we just want to make a change in the market and give students another option.”
Greenberg said making the scraping code available to anyone with a web connection and basic coding skills wasn’t profit driven, but simply an attempt to bring down textbook costs for college students with ever-tightening budgets.
“I felt I could do the most good by open sourcing it,” he said. “It’s about allowing students to save money, and that is what we’re about.”



                          Author Recent PostsDennis has covered higher education technology since April 2008, having interviewed some of the most recognized IT pros in U.S. colleges and universities. He is always updating eCampus News with the latest in pressing ed-tech issues, such as the growing i 

		