More brouhaha brewing at everybody’s favorite campus bookstore, the Harvard Coop, the latest confrontation involving members of the Harvard Undergraduate Council and some friends from the Cambridge police department. More eyes are watching this time, since boingboing has linked to both this Crimson story and an earlier incident as well (boingboing link for that is here).

This all started last year, when a few guys decided to found an online textbook comparison-shopping website called crimsonreading.org for Harvard classes. The website eventually partnered up with the Harvard Undergraduate Council (UC), but failed to garner any sort of support from the administration, nor the permission of the Coop to access the ISBN numbers of all the textbooks in the store. These ISBN number are crucial to providing the right books for each course, because they are unique to the each edition and printing. Usually these numbers are solicited from professors directly via phone or email, or for a small minority classes, they are available online from the course syllabus after classes have begun. The painstaking process of getting these numbers quickly before each semester is both the reason the Coop is so protective of its book list, and also the reason that it has been able to levy unnecessarily high mark-ups on books without suffering from significant competition. Very simply, there is no other place to get the right books for a course, and even students who care about saving money often have no choice but to buy from the Coop.

One alternative that has been available to students is to order books online. Sites like Amazon.com, Half.com, and Barnesandnoble.com have the sheer inventory size necessary to find almost any of the obscure scholarly volumes that the Coop gets shipped to it, as well as a flourishing used books market in which to find bargains or out-of-print editions quickly. However, despite the almost uniformly cheaper selection on these sites relative to the Coop, not to mention general student support for cheaper alternatives, most students still buy from the Coop because it’s faster, easier, and they are guaranteed the right edition for the class.

Crimsonreading.org’s approach is to make online comparison shopping for Harvard students easier by organizing book lists by course, in much the same way that they are organized at the Coop, and then by listing prices from many different online retailers for each book (the Coop itself being excluded because — surprise! — they don’t give out pricing info by phone, email, or on the web). This system makes buying online and comparing prices much easier, but of course, it is still online so there is the delay from shipping, and also the book lists can’t go up until ISBN numbers are obtained for all the courses. This is why the UC has been lobbying (unsuccessfully) to establish a public-domain ISBN list with the help of the administration. Unfortunately, this support has not been forthcoming. In the absence of a centrally enforced collection system, they’ve had no choice but to rely on individual professors and students themselves to generate their own ISBN list.

So far, the results have been impressive, but the sheer effort, spearheaded by just a few UC members, seems like it may be difficult to sustain into future years. Remember Redline textbooks? They provided cheap books directly, albeit with much greater effort than Crimsonreading’s model, but the service died out immediately after the founders graduated. Also, seeing as Crimsonreading is providing a comparison service, rather than direct sales, one might wonder how many students will actually find it important enough to use regularly. After all, most of the incentive for buying books at the Coop is the convenience factor.

All this makes me think that until the university itself is able to commit to an open, student-friendly approach to obtaining books, it will be not get significantly easier or less expensive for students to buy books. On the bright side, I suppose fighting the capitalist bureaucracy will continue to be a worthy exercise for Harvard’s ambitious UC members.