What would really be valuable and popular would be if you could find a way for us to get a group discount on these $80-$100 books that are priced as textbooks.
There is a huge amount of pent-up demand there.
Take the extreme but famous example of when one of those books, Lisp in Small Pieces, was mispriced for $13 including shipping at amazon.ca in 2007 -- it became the #1 seller, on a book that I imagine sells maybe a thousand copies in a year.
Nobody actually got their book (the publisher probably didn't have that many) and $13 is ridiculously cheap, but it's a fascinating story. Clearly, a lot of people had that book on their "someday wishlist" (a fantastic market for deal sites) or just appreciate a seemingly one-time deal on that kind of item.
If you can package books together, app-bundle style, or sell them out of season with the academic calendar, it would offer a good opportunity for price discrimination.
Also, although academic publishers are super-wary about the used book market, they also know that their textbooks are being torrented left and right. Maybe this would be a channel they could have more control in.
There's a pile of "textbooks" on my wishlist that I just can't afford. Something like this that would knock off a significant portion of the price would be amazing.
When the Pragmatic Bookshelf had their huge Thanksgiving sale last year, I dropped $300 dollars on books, which is pretty close to my usually yearly tech book spend.
What about "International Edition" textbooks? For example, the site could offer an international edition of a textbook for 1/10 the cost of the US edition. The International Edition textbooks are paperback, and of lower quality, but contain the same information, and are MUCH cheaper.
My understanding is that these are meant for developing nations, and the lower cost is an incentive for inducing education over there. Although it may be cheaper in the short term, in the long term you may be jeopardizing the business model and thus reducing developing nations' ability to obtain textbooks. Just throwing that out there.
I've heard a little about those editions but don't know much about them, so I think you might have some user education necessary. But it sounds great on the whole.
There is a huge amount of pent-up demand there.
Take the extreme but famous example of when one of those books, Lisp in Small Pieces, was mispriced for $13 including shipping at amazon.ca in 2007 -- it became the #1 seller, on a book that I imagine sells maybe a thousand copies in a year.
Nobody actually got their book (the publisher probably didn't have that many) and $13 is ridiculously cheap, but it's a fascinating story. Clearly, a lot of people had that book on their "someday wishlist" (a fantastic market for deal sites) or just appreciate a seemingly one-time deal on that kind of item.
If you can package books together, app-bundle style, or sell them out of season with the academic calendar, it would offer a good opportunity for price discrimination.
Also, although academic publishers are super-wary about the used book market, they also know that their textbooks are being torrented left and right. Maybe this would be a channel they could have more control in.