They were high school buddies from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Northern Virginia. One loved money. Another constructed sophisticated Web sites. The third simply befriended the other two. As college students attending school around the country, the three friends built Limespot.com, a Web site designed to cut costs of college texts.
The site allows undergraduates at about 30 schools in the United States to compare the prices of five online book companies for any given text. Students can either search for prices by book title or by class to get a list of required readings.
"I've always wanted a third party for pricing," said Jinsoo Ro, third-year College student and co-founder. "This site gives a consolidation of information."
Limespot.com, the brainchild of Harvard junior Greg Tseng, began last semester. Tseng and a high school buddy, Harvard junior Johann Schleier-Smith, looked into online text vendors that had been advertising around Harvard. Both discovered they could save $40 on one of their physics texts by ordering through an online company.
"We immediately told each other [about the savings], and this was the event that really led us to start believing in all the hype surrounding online bookstores," Tseng said.
Tseng and the computer savvy Schleier-Smith always had wanted a business, so they began working on a site that would consolidate several online vendors to offer Harvard students the best book prices.
"Greg always loved to be around money. He was really into math, but he is also good at contacting people," Ro said. "Johann made some really great Web sites in high school."
Phone calls to five online vendors yielded some large corporations who agreed to participate in the project. Among them were Amazon.com, VarsityBooks.com, Bigwords.com, Textbooks.com and Barnes & Noble.
Tseng obtained a list of books used by Harvard classes from the school's library. The Web site then was complete. A search engine showed a student what books would be needed for the semester. Links to the five online vendors resulted in a single-page chart listing the total costs from each vendor for a given text, including the cost of shipping and the shipping time.
Over Thanksgiving Break, Tseng and Ro reunited to discuss the expansion of the Web site. Tseng needed contacts at other universities to obtain book lists and to publicize the Web site. Ro recruited his roommate, second-year Engineering student Jay Sherman, to help.
"I was trying to get the book list over Christmas break, and I basically got the run-around," Sherman said.
But all of the persistence paid off. Sherman struck gold when University Relations told him how to obtain the document. The document, which is public record, listed most of the books that would be used by undergraduate classes for the spring semester.
"I received the list on Jan. 13, so I had as much information as the [University] Bookstore had at that time," Sherman said. "Some professors had not decided which books they were going to use yet. I'd say we had about 75 to 80 percent of all books."
After all the information was loaded into the Web site, the moment of truth arrived. Sherman used the site himself. He discovered he could save about $50 by ordering online.
In addition to buying new books through Limespot.com, students also may purchase used books.
"I'm a little skeptical of buying used books online because you can't see what condition they are in," Sherman said.
For other students, skepticism may run deeper. Since books only may be purchased online using a credit card, security issues are a typical concern. But Sherman said the risk is minimal.
"I was once told that it's safer to buy stuff online than to have your credit card swiped at the mall," he said. "The cashier at the mall can get your credit card number. Most fraud is done that way or by finding out a person's number through the trash."
In addition to having computerized safeguards to protect buyers, the five online companies have privacy policies, Ro said.
"The sites guarantee that they'll pay for any damages if their safeguards fail," he said.
Students also may hesitate to purchase books online because of concerns about when the orders will arrive. Limespot.com lists the shipping time for each company, but the listed time can be misleading.
"The shipping time, which is listed on the site, is how long it takes the company to get the book out of the stock house and into the hands of" United Parcel Services, Sherman said. "After that, it's up to UPS on how long it takes."
On average, if a company lists a 24-hour shipping time, a student should allow two to three days for the book to arrive, he said. A student can choose other companies besides UPS, which will cut the overall shipping time. These companies will charge more.
Last Wednesday, the site received 630 hits from University students.
As far as Ro and Sherman know, the most a student saved on one book was $62.99. The list price, which is the price a publisher recommends to vendors, was $102.95 for a new copy of "Fundamentals of Machine Component Design" by Robert C. Juvinall. At press time, Bigwords.com offered the book new for $39.01, including shipping.
However, Sherman said it is possible that this price is a typo and that the company has not yet realized its mistake in listing such a low price.
Fifth-year Engineering student Darby Kimball, who ordered the book for ME 346, agreed that the low price was probably a mistake.
"I honestly think it is a typo and that Bigwords.com meant to sell it for $93 instead of $39," Darby said. "The thing with the Internet is that you come across these errors quicker, and you can take advantage of them."
While savings of Kimball's magnitude are the minority of cases, most students can find $5 to $10 savings for all major texts through Limespot.com, Sherman said. These savings are in comparison to the listed price and local bookstores' prices.
Ro blames overhead costs and poor deals from vendors for higher prices in the local bookstores.
"I can't blame them [for higher prices than the Internet vendors]. If you think about it, the bookstores really don't order that many books. The vendors can't give them good prices. This combined with overhead costs means that the bookstores can't give students good prices," he said.
With the proliferation of the Web in recent years, Limespot.com is only one new online method for purchasing texts. HooHock.com also allows University students to buy used books from each other. Ro and Sammer Sabri, creator of HooHock.com, are friends. But the sites are separate enterprises.
In the near future, Tseng said he would like to expand the Web site so that more schools are added. Presently, he only will add schools that his friends attend. This ensures contact between Limespot.com and the student body, yielding a site that is more tailored to the individual needs of participating schools.
"We believe that this bottom-up approach will increase the quality of the service at the schools that we target because the students at the colleges know what other students want and can relate that information to us," Tseng said. "Although we seek to expand rapidly, we will only expand to schools where we can find a very good site master and thus be confident to produce a high quality site."
This emphasis on tailoring the site to the individual schools eventually may allow expanded capabilities like a dating service and a list of local activities at bars and fraternities, Tseng said.
But for now the emphasis of Limespot.com is price comparison between online vendors.
"We are telling people what they can get for the cost without the monopoly of the bookstore," Sherman said. "This gives students another option"
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