Today is the first day of Fall quarter classes and it is pretty weird being back in the “real deal” GSB courses. It’s great to see all of my classmates again and hear about how everyone’s summers went, but, as my professors go over the work that we’ll have to do in their classes, i can’t help but get freaked out. This is going to be a long and tiring quarter with my classes and the interview process kicking off soon. This actually isn’t the reason I’m writing this message though…
I’m actually writing this entry to put the word out about a great new business that one of my classmates launched over the summer. A few weeks ago, my man Harish launched a company called TextBookGenie (http://www.textbookgenie.com/) that allows customers to search for books individually and based on their schools’ study lists. I’m using a computer in the GSB computer lab, so i can take any screen shots of the site to post up here, but here are some highlights:
- You can search for books based on ISDN, author, or title
- You can do a search for books based on university and further based on individual departments and course numbers
- Their low-price search engine checks a ton of sites to find the lowest prices on new and used versions of books (and lets you do comparisons of prices at different sites)
- The site has a book-bundling algorithm (SaveXtra) that will take the collection of items in your shopping cart and perform another search to find out if there is a more optimal combination of offerings from other sites that will give you a lower overall cost.
- There is also functionality to let you get all your books from a single merchant (SaveHassle) to reduce the hassle of getting packages and paying shipping costs at multiple merchant sites
I’m pretty sure that there are other features too but I haven’t had a chance to go through it too closely yet. I got a guided tour of it earlier today and was amazed at how clean the interface was and how easy the site is to figure out. Also, he showed me the deals that their low-price search algorithm came up with and I realized that i could have saved over $100 on my books for this quarter if I’d used it. I’m definitely going to get all of my books on TextBookGenie for Winter and Spring quarter and am trying to get the word out about it because I’m all about helping people save money on the school game if at all possible.
If you’re reading this and are currently in school, I’d highly recommend checking it out. Right now, they’ve only got the course reading lists listed for four universities, but they are expanding that list of schools every day and you can also search for individual books based on general info (ISDN, title, author). Also, if you know anybody in school, feel free to let them know about this service. I know that I’ve written a lot about this site, but, ss I sit here in my second year of being a broke grad student, I know that every dollar of savings can go a LONG way.
