Textbook Price-Saving Site Endures

Students hoping to save money on textbooks this fall will have the services of a student-run price-comparison Web site at their disposal for a third consecutive semester, despite a history of administrative reluctance to support the project.

Co-founded by UC representative Tom D. Hadfield ’08, CrimsonReading.org allows undergraduate textbook shoppers to view Coop prices alongside those charged by other retailers, such as Half.com and Amazon.com. Books are quickly being added to the database in anticipation of the start of shopping period on Monday, according to site director Jon T. Staff V ’10.

But Staff said the work of preparing the site has not been as efficient as it might have been had College administrators and Coop officials signed on to a UC proposal last spring that would have promoted the sharing of textbook information between Crimson Reading and the Coop, which traditionally collects lists of required books from professors each year.

“Professors are very good about giving their book lists to the Coop and the libraries...and professors are not yet as good as giving their book lists to us,” Staff said.

This is not to say that faculty have been unwilling to cooperate. An e-mail sent to professors around noon yesterday by UC President Ryan A. Petersen ‘08 to solicit lists of required textbooks had garnered more than 15 responses in the first two hours, said Staff.

“It just sounded like a reasonable thing to me,” said Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, who leads Life Sciences 2, “Evolutionary Human Physiology and Anatomy.”

“I don’t know why the administration wouldn’t support it,” he added.

For their part, administrators said last spring that they were hesitant to endorse the enterprise due to concerns that it would hurt the market fortunes of the Harvard Coop.

“I didn’t think that I could financially support an effort that was in some ways in opposition to the Harvard Coop. I couldn’t take a position on that,” then-Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 told the Crimson last spring. His successor, interim dean David Pilbeam, could not be reached for comment late last night.

Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said yesterday that when approached by the UC a few months ago, the Coop could not survive financially if it had to share textbook information.

“We’ve gone to the trouble of collecting the intellectual property of the book lists,” he said.

“And we wanted to make sure that we’re not going to—my words—shoot ourselves in the foot in terms of how we give that information out. That’s a valuable asset to us,” he said, although Murphy did not rule out the possibility of a partnership with Crimson Reading in the future.

Starting this summer, undergraduates have done this semester’s work on their own. Sitting in the UC’s office in the Quad, Staff and two Crimson Reading employees have been using a 30-page checklist to cull book information from the online syllabi of all courses offered to undergraduates this semester.

“Since Harvard refuses to provide us with course reading lists and the Coop refuses to provide us with course reading lists we have to be here, and manually build those lists up, and hound professors and TFs to give them to us so that we can provide this student service,” Staff said.

In the meantime, help came from other quarters.

“He’s our guardian, he’s getting twenty bucks an hour back there” said Staff, gesturing at a sizable—and surprisingly lifelike—cardboard cut-out of the mug-wielding colonial beer-shill Samuel Adams, Class of 1740.

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