Word: isbn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...students themselves come and go and have little influence. To cite just one small example, last year at Harvard an enterprising student noticed that the Harvard Coop was selling the required books at high prices. So the student decided to publish a list of required books with their ISBN numbers online to make it easy for students to order them from other sources. As the student made his way through the Coop writing down these numbers, he was threatened with arrest for stealing proprietary information! In the brouhaha that followed, some faculty members justified the Coop’s monopoly...
...approved a motion to make all of their future published academic works, the product of all that time not spent in office hours, available within the Harvard community. Plus, the lack of costs in accessing these publications means no more undercover trips to the COOP in search of hidden ISBN numbers...
...criticism for undergraduates. Last year, students from the Crimson Reading Web site—which allows students to compare textbook prices online for selected courses—had a run-in with the Coop when staff members called the police on them for refusing to leave while copying down ISBN numbers. Crimson Reading Director Jon T. Staff V ’10 welcomed the committee’s actions, saying they were a positive step towards reducing textbook prices. “I think that anything they can do to try to lower the cost of textbook students is worth...
After a tense fall shopping period that featured a standoff involving HUPD, the relationship between CrimsonReading.org and The Harvard Coop seems to have warmed in time for the spring semester. Employees of the textbook-price-comparison Web site are continuing to copy the International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) of texts for Harvard courses, and they say that unlike last semester, the Coop has turned a blind eye to the practice. “We told the Coop we’re not interested in a fight like last semester,” said CrimsonReading co-founder and Undergraduate Council...
Next semester, students may not have to risk being kicked out of the Coop to get the ISBN numbers of their textbooks. In its meeting last week, the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) discussed a proposal to create a database, the Harvard College Book Information System, where students could find the ISBN numbers of each book on every course syllabus. We wholeheartedly support such an initiative, which would make it easier for students to comparison-shop online and save money on their books. Although the Coop provides the conveniences of centralization and proximity, its virtual monopoly on ISBN numbers...