Council Discontinues UC Books Website

Harvard students hoping to avail themselves of bargain textbook prices at the UC Books website this year have instead been finding a message reading, “Internal server error.”

And that, it seems, is the inglorious coda to the tale of what was once one of the Undergraduate Council’s more popular endeavors. The council has decided to discontinue the service to focus it’s energies on other aspects of its technological services, said council President Sujean S. Lee ’03 yesterday.

“We decided that it just wouldn’t be useful to continue,” Lee said. “At the time it was created, it did provide a tremendous service, but right now there are so many websites that provide the same service.”

Lee said that in the “cost-benefit analysis” of UC Books, the dwindling popularity of the program was outweighed by the tremendous effort required to maintain it. Instead, she said, the council is focusing on other technology, such as designing a more user-friendly website.

The website was introduced in 2000 by Paul A. Gusmorino ’02, who went on to become the council’s president in 2001. It allowed students to quickly search numerous online booksellers to find the lowest price on textbooks for some of the most popular classes on campus.

Gusmorino, a computer science concentrator, managed the site along with a team of five other council members until his graduation last year. The program began as a class project by Gusmorino, for which he received credit.

“It was Gusmorino’s personal project, and he took sole responsibility for its upkeep,” said Lee. “When he left, no one had been trained to continue it.”

The program was greeted enthusiastically when first launched. In recent years, though, the savings over other textbook sellers had decreased and competition from other discount textbook websites, such as varsitybooks.com and ecampus.com, had increased.

Last March, The Crimson reported that the program was facing difficulty in both decreasing popularity among the general student body and low interest among council members. The program relied on council members to provide required ISBN codes of textbooks searchable on its site. As of last spring, this was occurring with less and less frequency.

At that time, Gusmorino was quoted as saying, “We could just stop doing it...For it to continue, there needs to be someone motivated and interested in continuing this service.”

Gusmorino said yesterday he was unaware the council had decided to discontinue the service. But he added that the website had to be updated each semester, meaning that the site would cease to function without deliberate effort.

While Lee said UC Books has been discontinued, with no plans to revive it, several council members said yesterday that they thought the program might continue.

Council member Luke R. Long ’03 said there had been no official vote to disband the program since preliminary discussions about its fate last spring.

“I assume we’re trying to find someone to put those hours in,” he said.

Rohit Chopra ’03, chair of the student affairs committee, was also optimistic about UC Books’ future. He said yesterday that the council’s technology task force would be going back to the drawing board in an effort to make the program more competitive with other online textbook vendors.