I started attending the University of Lethbridge in September 2004. In my first year I took some courses, and I only managed to find one used textbook–by luck–in the bulletin boards.
Can’t find textbooks!
After that first semester, I haven’t really been able to find cheap, or used textbooks. The reason is that the bulletin boards are chaotic at best and ‘searching’ for information in them is, well, madness.
Covered up
Textbook Revolution?!!!
That’s right, textbook revolution 
. So, after sitting and doing absolutely nothing about this issue (except for complain about book prices), I decided to do something about it.
I was taking a database class and it had a project component. I proposed the idea of a book exchange site to the professor and he seemed to like it. For the next couple of months I went to work creating mockups and then the back end and of course, what’s a site without animation these days–who wants to look amateur!
The deadline came looming and the site, well, wasn’t where I wanted it to be, therefore I only got 13/15 on the project. Not to worry as I wasn’t really doing this for the class…the marks were a bonus! I kept working and working and on January 08, 2009, I release the first ‘version’ of the site which became ulethbooks.ca.
After introducing this idea to the university community and friends, feedback was phenomenal and it got me excited! Then I went working on GizmoBooks.com — The Textbook Revolution! I wanted to have this easy to use site accessable to students across North America and, although not sure about the concept, even outside North America!
Anyway, that’s my little story of how The Textbook Revolution came to be and I would love to hear from you with your ideas, feedback and comments.
Until next post!
Compete with that!
