Before using myBookCrate, College of Arts and Sciences senior Lizzie Green said she had no intention of ordering books from the Internet. Like a number of Boston University students, however, she decided to give it a try and put her books on the market.
“I decided to actually just try it . . . because I have a bunch of books that I haven’t sold yet, and it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life . . . all I had to do was put in the ISBN number and you have your book,” Green said.
MyBookCrate is a company that lets students buy and resell used textbooks to one another. It was founded by CAS junior Erik Bogaard.
Since the company’s launch on Nov. 16, Bogaard and his team of engineers and BU peers have continued work to grow the company and to strengthen the concept of student-to-student sales.
“I began to realize middle men are continually [taking] advantage of students,” Bogaard said. “Some of the profits being made by some of the larger companies were much higher than they should’ve been if they really had the students’ best interests in mind.”
Bogaard, who said he spent months preparing for the website, has taken a leave of absence from BU this semester to work on building his company and will likely not return until Fall 2012. He spent an average of 10 hours a day learning how to program the site, while managing a full course load last semester, and said he realized it would be too much of a responsibility to continue.
One shortfall Bogaard said he saw in the textbook selling business was that students never had a marketplace that focused on them.
“There was never a marketplace that allowed a student to get in contact with another fellow student, especially on a local level,” he said.
Bogaard said the idea first came to mind after he spent four years buying and reselling used textbooks from students at his Los Angeles high school, where students had to buy new books each year.
“With my experience, I knew what I could do to make it better, to improve it for everyone by essentially removing my past job,” he said.
Timmy Shivers, a College of Communication sophomore, said he used to rely on Amazon to avoid the high prices of the on-campus bookstore.
“I went online to the [myBookCrate] website as soon as it launched and it was accessible,” Shivers said. “I think it has a lot of potential.”
MyBookCrate also has features that most other online companies lack, such as logging in with Facebook, optional shipping and using a calendar to post availability for books a student wants to sell ahead of time.
The myBookCrate commission is set at 10 percent, a rate Bogaard said he did not initially want to implement, but needed to cover expenses.
“I really wanted to do a 99 cent commission, flat rate, on any book but I quickly realized that in the world of business it just wouldn’t have worked,” Bogaard. “With the cost involved, we would’ve had to have everyone in the world taking part in the business to pay our expenses, but I really wanted to make sure that the cost was the lowest.”
Some students said they consider the campus bookstore to be the most expensive, and consequentially the least desirable, option for getting textbooks.
“I ended up spending . . . a ridiculous amount of money on one textbook,” said CAS freshman Carly Murray.
After using myBookCrate, Murray called it “super reliable.”
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