TextbookP2P provides a free network for students to sell books to one another rather than through middlemen. We only allow college students (from the same university) to use it and hope that providing this P2P community will help students to help each other.
Bookstores and online retailers incur significant costs shipping, storing and organizing inventory for the student population. Unfortunately (fortunately for you), most of this effort (read “cost”) is not required if students are provided with a free, easy method of finding the next student that needs their books.
Let’s assume buy a book from the bookstore for $200 dollars. Most bookstores will buy the book back for around $100. You essentially lose a $100 each time for every book. However, if you sell to a student, you have bargaining power, and both of you want to avoid buying from the bookstore or a third-party retailer. So youll likely split the benefit and settle on a price around $150. The buyer ends up buying the book for about $50 dollars cheaper, and the seller gets $50 more off the sale. Both of you win, and this way the bookstore doesnt take advantage of the one thing that you lack, a network.
All we’ve done at TextbookP2P is found a way to take the profit the bookstore and online companies make off you and redistributed it to the students.