Coop Cracks Down on Council

An Undergraduate Council (UC) operation aimed at providing students with cheaper textbooks suffered a setback when Harvard Coop officials asked UC representatives to leave the floor where they were collecting information on textbooks.

Tuesday’s incident, however, did not prevent the student-run Web site crimsonreading.org from going live this week. The site, known as Crimson Reading, allows prospective buyers to compare textbook prices online.

ISBN numbers are the ten-digit numbers attached to each book to serve as unique identifiers. “We need that database of ISBN numbers to keep the Web site running,” Crimson Reading co-founder Tom D. Hadfield ’08 said.

And in fact it was Hadfield himself who, together with a few friends, spent much of August in the Coop bookstore, using notepads to record ISBN information for nearly 2,500 textbooks to get the site up and running in September. With the spring semester set to begin, he said, he thought it wise to enlist the help of the UC.

According to UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08, about 95 percent of this spring’s ISBN numbers were eventually recorded, despite the Coop’s intervention.

Still, the friction with Coop officials was frustrating, said Petersen, who had initially hoped that the Coop would freely provide the ISBN numbers of the textbooks it carried.

“Our goal is to make sure textbooks are cheaper both in the store and online and the only way we can accomplish that is by working with the Coop,” he said. “Which is why this setback has been a little disappointing.”

According to a senior manager at the Coop who requested to go unnamed because of store policy, the UC representatives were asked to leave because they failed to have their activities approved in advance. Also at issue was what he said was the

sensitive nature of the information being taken.

“We hadn’t been notified, and what we had were students in every aisle with spreadsheets, writing down ISBN numbers,” he said. “The ISBN is a lot of work to get. It’s almost intellectual property.”

The process of isolating the appropriate ISBN number for a particular course textbook, the manager said, involves multiple phone calls to professors and publishers. Student-set prices would not reflect the time and resources necessary to obtain the ISBN.

This undercutting, he added, would be injurious to other students, who would have to deal with tightened restrictions on textbook returns.

Hadfield, however, said he suspected different motivations for ISBN-withholding on the part of the Coop.

“The Coop charges too much for textbooks and they don’t want people to find out,” he said. “They are not keen on us writing down ISBN information because they do not want students to find out that they are charging too much for textbooks.”

Hadfield did note that while the Coop was aware that he was copying ISBNs in the fall, they never gave him the “explicit permission” to write them down.

“The thing that’s funny about it is that I personally had interactions with the employees there,” said UC Representative Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10. “And one of them actually asked if we needed anything and another said, ‘Oh, so you’re finally getting them online.’ So it’s not that we were in any way being sneaky and deceptive.”

According to Petersen, Crimson Reading takes a 7 percent referral on its sales, 75 percent of which goes to help build a school in Zambia. The other 25 percent goes to support UC projects.

Hadfield said that $50,000 worth of books were sold on Crimson Reading during the fall semester, $3,000 of which went to Zambia.

“This semester,” Hadfield said, “I would love to double that with the UC’s help.”

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.