BCBookworm.com Bio

BCbookworm.com started in December of 2001.

I was in my first year of Business and I had been frantically scrawling notes to remind myself of all the bills I had to pay and all the calls I had to make. As it was the start of a new term, everyone had to get new books. Before going to bed one night, for some reason, I had written on my list of things to do, 'Sell textbooks for $30 each'.

The next morning I woke up and saw the note. I thought about it, and decided that I wasn't going back to the campus bookstore again. I had been burned the year before at Carleton University and imagined Kwantlen was the same. Logically, there must be someone out there who wants to sell his or her $70 book for half price, and I wasn't about to let it go for $5 at the bookstore.

So I pulled the name Bookvalue out of an Accounting textbook and started buying textbooks off of other students for 50% and selling them to other students for 75%. I started amassing textbooks, so I began plugging away at a Geocities website that would advertise my books to other students. At that time I had enjoyed modest success with my little business and began to salivate at the possibilities of being a 'people-broker'.

I renamed the website Studentvalue (Bookvalue being the centerpiece) and began to add Student-oriented services: Discvalue was a second hand CD venture; FreeRide was a carpooling service; StudentHousing was a listing for apartments and homes; Wheels was a used-car listing.

Needless to say, things got a little out of hand. My reasoning went a little like this: the more pages I added to my site, the more likely students were to stumble upon my Bookvalue page and buy books off me.

After the initial explosion of services (I had even begun to add games to the site and a weekly mailbag) I was thinking a little more clearly and began to take down more and more services.

At the end of the day, I had to ask myself, 'Would I use this service? Would I like to be a member of this group?'

In most cases, the answer was no. Either there were other solutions for those problems or those problems weren't really problems concerning students (as in the Carpooling idea).

But the textbook idea stuck. Because, no matter what, Campus bookstores are always going to have overhead that can't compete with a website. Moreover, the system I had in mind meant there would be no amassing of textbooks.

So in the summer of 2002, I began asking people about a new textbook site. No geocities. No overhead. No middleman.

Now, almost a year after its initial inception, BCbookworm.com is a reality. It looks amazing and it works beautifully. The most satisfying thing of all is that I know eventually thousands of people will be saving money from this site. And soon, maybe the Bookstore will have to find ways to cut costs and local retailers will begin to empower their customers to get their hard earned money.

Mike Robson
Founder