Web site, LSU SGA team to fight textbook costs

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Aug 5, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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When two LSU students created a Web site in 2005 to help fellow students buy and sell used textbooks, they learned a hard fact of business life: It’s hard to grow if people don’t know about you.

“We pumped all our money into the development of the actual script,” said John Snow, who joined Conrad Sulzer in developing the University Tiger Web site. “Our marketing budget was so nonexistent that we were having to do things as basic as go door-to-door. … That was a big problem.”

It won’t be any longer.

This summer, LSU’s Student Government Association bought the license to use University Tiger (http://www.universitytiger.com/) and ultimately plans to put a link to University Tiger on the PAWS online portal that every LSU student uses, Snow said.

Buying the rights to use University Tiger is part of a comprehensive plan to fight rising textbook costs, said SGA President Colorado Robertson. Last summer, the SGA was looking into developing an online textbook exchange.

“We saw that and kind of went to them and said, ‘Hey, we’ve already got this thing up and running, so if y’all want to use the funds that you’ve dedicated to developing a software and just buy ours, then we’d be more than happy to do that and license a copy of it to you,’” Snow said. “It was, like, an eight-month process. Dealing with LSU, you have to go through so many layers of approval.”

For $3,000, SGA got the rights to use University Tiger’s software and use of the server hosting the site for five years, Robertson said. The SGA will not receive any money off the sale of books, although buyers who use PayPal to pay for the transaction will have to pay a service fee, he said.

Robertson said he never has bought books from University Tiger but thinks this kind of transaction is a wave of the future.

“More and more students who come in as freshmen are used to buying and selling things online and are more apt to use it,” Robertson said. “At least, that’s what our surveys tell us.”

At its peak, Snow said, University Tiger had about 500 students registered and about the same number of books for sale — not bad, but a drop in the bucket of its potential on a campus of about 30,000 students. Its premise is that both the buyer and seller get a better deal if they buy used textbooks from each other rather than bookstores being the middleman.

“There were several periods where we had really high volume and high usage, and I actually heard back from a few people directly who … said that their transaction had gone really smoothly, that they had met up with this person on campus, it was exactly what they were looking for,” Snow said.

More students are likely to look for University Tiger when PAWS links to it, Snow said. Robertson said SGA will promote it, with the big emphasis coming late in the fall semester because that’s when more students will be looking to sell textbooks in courses they are finishing.

“The thing about University Tiger, in order to buy a book from it, someone has to be selling a book,” Robertson said. “It’s almost going to take a whole semester to get the idea (out).”