Contrib: Textbook
Lead(s): Jim Eng, Gonzalo Silverio, John Leasia, Sean Michael DeMonner
Description:
A tool to facilitate the identification, buying and selling of textbooks.
The objective of this project is to reduce student costs by identifying books earlier in the academic cycle and by facilitating the establishment of a student-driven used book market.The Textbook Tool has two main components:
A. Textbook List:
- allows an instructor to identify textbooks to associate with a given course within Sakai. The list of books is presented through MyWorkspace and a Course Site (although a class does not have to have site to have a textbook list)
- allows a student to view the list of textbooks associated with a course
- provides a gateway to uBook (see below)
- will allow for ISBN lookup via configurable external services
B. uBook:
- allows a student to post books for sale
- allows a student to search for posted books
- provides basic contact information for students to arrange for a transaction
The Textbook Tool will have the following configuration options:
- the textbook entry screen may be turned off and associated data accepted from an external source
- the ISBN lookup may be set to an external search engine; the default service will be a free, low-traffic service
The latest mockups for the project are available here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gsilver/tt3/templates
Comments (5)
Dec 02, 2007
Jason Shao says:
We just started a book club (as a project site @ Rutgers) and I would have loved...We just started a book club (as a project site @ Rutgers) and I would have loved to have something like this for either "Course Texts" or "Reading list" type scenarios.
Any thoughts on who you would integrate purchasing with? I think technically a Rutgers system would have to access Follett – but I believe they have some kind of storefront API.
Dec 03, 2007
Sean Michael DeMonner says:
We have requirements gathering meetings with a few of our local booksellers sche...We have requirements gathering meetings with a few of our local booksellers scheduled over the next couple of weeks. It is not yet clear the degree to which we will attempt to integrate with their systems, but our general approach will be to avoid deep integrations. We may provide for example, content feeds for the booksellers or possibly bookseller accounts on the systems. We've also discussed linking to booksellers' sites to facilitate eCommerce, although we do not plan on having any eCommerce components ourselves.
Dec 03, 2007
Jason Shao says:
That sounds reasonable. I know we would probably be happy with the ability to ge...That sounds reasonable. I know we would probably be happy with the ability to generate links directly to an item on a vendor site, whether that site was Amazon, or EFollet, or whatever, perhaps with a way to produce "LinkProviders" to generate the links.
Dec 19, 2007
Hannah Reeves says:
Hey Sean, long ago when Jay Fern was at IU, he was working on integrating OnCour...Hey Sean, long ago when Jay Fern was at IU, he was working on integrating OnCourse with campus textbook ordering and purchasing. Not sure whether you've spoken with anyone at IU about this but you may want to see whether they've implemented something similar. Seems like a neat idea.
Dec 19, 2007
Sean Michael DeMonner says:
Thanks for the lead Hannah. We have not yet spoken to anyone at IU, but it may b...Thanks for the lead Hannah. We have not yet spoken to anyone at IU, but it may be worthwhile to see what lessons they may have learned.
SMD.