Project Name: Book Share

Description: Several textbook rental companies provide wide range of textbooks rental for students. Although their goal is to save money for students and to keep textbooks recyclable, most of their rental price is still 50% over the original price of the textbook.

Some examples are in the following:

i.e Algorithms at www.amazon.com http://goo.gl/j3gPgh 37.62USD to rent; 68.52USD to buy

i.e JavaScript and jQuery http://goo.gl/4Ul5fu 14.11 to 30.65USD to rent; 35.25USD to buy

Usually hard science book costs more for renting: i.e: Physical Chemistry book at amazon.com http://goo.gl/Sz3v99 74.88USD to rent; 87.66USD to buy.

i.e. Transport Phenomena at campusbookrental.com http://goo.gl/nFbq87 74.30USD to rent; 95.41USD to buy

Why the rental price is so high?

1. Maintenance cost for their system, staff and platform. This traditional business model is called B2C(Business to Customer)

2. Damage control for the textbooks. Some damage may occur during the rental time, rental company has to buy new textbooks.

3. Shipping cost. Usually rental companies are in charge for bidirectional shipping.

Proposal: We would like to apply the C2C(Customer to Customer) business model to textbook rental. After signing up to our website, students are able to post their available/wanted titles under certain category . Rental price will be recommended by the website, normally within 25% cost of new textbook price. Once the payment is accepted, the website will advise the lender to ship the book by borrower's choice (USPS,FedEx,UPS, offline if same campus). The booked is returned to the lender after one semester. In this scenario, two customers are doing business directly with each other. Lender can start to earn money after 4 or 5 times rental while he/she can keep the book. Borrower is able to save the cost of rental books. We also intend to build a review system to minimize the risks for textbook damage. Note: No need to create separate accounts for borrower and lender since one can be both borrower and lender.

Target Audience

Our target audiences are mainly college students, who seek to take advantage of renting textbooks at low price. Students who already owned several textbooks can also earn the money through the website. In future, we intend to extend our target audience to everyone who reads. In other words, we will not limit the type of book. Currently, we will focus on textbook.

Features to meet the minimum:

Users can create their individual accounts. Once the account is established, they can feel free to update their school information, shipping address, books available for renting, and books they wish to rent. Also, users can search for the textbooks they intend to rent. Search results will be presented on a webpage. If a textbook is rented out, users can delete the entry. We also require users to post pictures of the textbooks before renting, which can provide future borrowers with a general idea of the condition of the book. Also, this can be proof for possible damage of textbook. Ajax engine and jQuery library will be applied to create animations in the webpage and meet above functionalities without users reloading the webpage.

To our best of knowledge, no C2C textbook rentals haven’t hit in the market yet. Most of textbooks rental are done by B2C.