New app lets you buy used textbooks from fellow students

Theo Thimou | March 22nd, 2017

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Nobody likes having to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year on used textbooks! Thankfully, there’s a new app that aims to offer books in a peer-to-peer model at a substantial discount.

Meet Book U.

BookUApp.com is a new app currently only serving three campuses in the state of Florida. But if the idea works, a nationwide rollout will be imminent.

BookU allows students to be their own bookstore—which is the app’s slogan—and sell to one another rather than selling their old books back to the campus bookstore. By doing that, the seller gets more money, the buyer pays a lower price and everyone feels like they got a deal.

It sounds like just an updated version of a textbook exchange, but it’s much more that just that!

Students are encouraged to create and list their study guides for sale, alongside other learning aids like scientific calculators and I-clickers, according to Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper.

The app charges a 7% transaction fee on every sale. On the payment processing side, there’s a 3% fee plus 25 cents.

The high cost of college textbooks has long been something that’s irked Clark.

‘I think about myself, working through graduate school on a free ride from IBM for all college expenses—except books. So I would go through a course without the textbook about a third of the time,’ the consumer champ recalls. ‘It put me at a disadvantage, but that was the situation I was in. Today’s kids can’t afford expensive books either.’