TigerBooks.ca

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Project Organizer: Chris Jordan

An Online Book Exchange System
Contributing Members:
Chris Jordan, Sean Smith, David Nichols, Mike Atherton (past administrator), Hannah Davis
{cjordan, ssmith, nichols, atherton, hannah}@cs.dal.ca

Selling and buying used textbooks is an activity that almost every University and College student does at the beginning and end of every semester. Textbooks are expensive especially when they are new. The traditional approach for students to sell their textbooks is by posting advertisements around the their campus. The problem with this is that students that want to buy these textbooks then have to search through bulletin boards. This is a time consuming activity especially on large campuses. Furthermore, posting advertisements uses a lot of paper making it not environmentally friendly.

TigerBooks (http://www.tigerbooks.ca) is an online book exchange system. It allows students to quickly posts books for sale and look for ones to buy. It overcomes both the timeliness and environmental issues with having to actually post paper advertisements on bulletin boards. In its first 8 months of operation at Dalhousie, TigerBooks had over 4500 books posted for sale; over 1100 books have been sold.

There are other book exchange systems currently available. However, TigerBooks is an open source solution. This means that it is freely available to any University or College that wishes to use it for its own students. Furthermore, any University or College can make contributions to the TigerBooks thus distributing its maintenance costs. Maintenance costs are particularly important in academic realms as students are only at their institutions for the duration of their program. Being an open source solution means the Universities and Colleges do not have to worry about who will be maintaining TigerBooks in the years to come.

TigerBooks is a successful open source project and will see greater success in the future as it is distributed amongst Universities and Colleges. It is successful really for two reasons. The first being that is meets the needs of students in exchanging their textbooks. The second is that it is open source and consequently is maintained by the open source community.

TigerBooks is a project initiated by the Dalhousie Student Chapter of the ACM (www.dal-acm.ca) in coordination with the Dalhousie Student Union (www.dsu.ca). It is hosted as an open source project on source forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tigerbooks/).

The above is appearing in the proceedings of CEOS 2005