[3853] in APO News
Book Exchange thoughts / apocrypha article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Oscar A Rodriquez)
Mon Apr 5 11:53:34 1999
To: Melissa Dullea <mdullea@MIT.EDU>
Cc: apo-news@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 1999 11:48:46 EDT
From: Oscar A Rodriquez <orod@MIT.EDU>
As I am really busy the first three days of this week, I won't be able
to make the meeting tonight. I have addressed all the issues that
Melissa brought up point by point and have added some suggestions for
your consideration.
Yours In Service,
OROD
> The UA's model of a book exchange has several advantages over
> APO's current incarnation of the project:
> -It can be run 24 hours a day, year-round, instead of eight
> hours a day for four days out of each term.
I would agree that this is an advantage given the wide range
of times that our target audience would like to use our services
> -Since one need only access to an internet browser and email,
> this format has the potential to serve more students than our current
> model, in which students need to find time to physically walk to the
> student center during book exchange hours to find out what books are
> available.
Not all students prefer to conduct business on the web, but
would allow us to reach a broader audience and provide them
with information which would hopefully be in a format as
convenient as browsing the segregated shelves (current system).
> -Because buyers and sellers interact directly, we remove the
> enormous (and sometimes overly straining) demand for APO's manpower at
> the beginning of each term (this point can be seen as both an
> advantage and a disadvantage.)
I would say that the manpower requirement is irrelavent, all
other things being equal. Some buyers and sellers do not have
the time or energy (or desire) to deal with the sale of their
books on an indivdual basis. The current "clearinghouse" system
caters to this need.
> -We eliminate the awkward negative interactions that occur in
> our current incarnation of the book exchange, for example dealing with
> lost or stolen books or people who've forgotten to pick up their books
> and have had their books donated to charity.
This is a side effect of being the middle man. This system
would avoid direct confrentation, but the proposed system
would require that we be a complaint collection/resolution
agency for users of the system (for lack of anyone else to
complain to).
> -Book sellers get their money immediately upon surrendering
> their books, instead of waiting for several weeks for us to process
> the funds.
This goes with the above comment about buyer/seller interaction.
Some users of our service are quite happy to wait if it means
that they get one check for all their books instead of several
small checks which they have to collect themselves.
> Disadvantages to the on-line book exchange include:
> -We may lose a revenue-generating project for the chapter.
> (Assuming that an on-line book exchange and APO's current incarnation
> of a book exchange cannot coexist in harmony)
The revenue side of the issue should not dominate this discussion
as clients of the service will choose the one they find most
useful. The goal then is to provide the most useful service
possible to the MIT Community. I do believe that these
services can exist in harmony, if we choose to do so, but
in that case APO should coordinate them to make sure to use
them to help each other, not compete against one another.
> -We could lose one of our most visible projects on the MIT
> campus. (Although one could argue that if we embraced the on-line
> exchange, we could create a positive interaction between APO and the
> MIT community.)
This is the best argument for APO creating an online exchange
(at the request of the UA). It will allow us to have another
visible campus service that will run year round. Losing
visibility at this point could cause irreparable harm to
the chapters operations.
> Should our emphasis be on serving the MIT community? Can we
> bear to lose another of our long-term, revenue generating projects?
This comes down to "What do we want to accomplish with the Book
Exchange?" In my mind the answer to this is that Book Exchange
should provided a needed service to the community at a minimal
cost as well as provide us with needed positive exposure.
I believe that the online book exchange idea has possibilities
and that the Chapter can exploit it's benefits and minimize
its costs by creating a mixture of what we have now with
what is being proposed. I also believe that any action
we take should have no "requirements" placed on it by the UA.
To the end, any agreement to create and maintain such a system
should be accompanied by a statement of non-competition stating
that APO is the only student group or agency of the student
government authorized to conduct on campus "Book Exchanges"
whether real or virtual.
This statement serves two purposes. First, it guarantees
that we have complete freedom to create what we feel is
the best system without complications from the UA and second,
it allows us to be sure that there is no other student org.
(since we can not control outside businesses) that will
create a similar exchange which may harm APO's credibility.
One other issue I would like to address is cost of maintaining
the online exchange. As far as I can tell, all implementations
of this system would be fairly inexpensive. We would have to
run a webserver with the relevent data and maintain it. The
inital setup would take time, but could be done over the
summer. If the system receives enough traffic to warrent
a dedicated server, the cost would be minimal and fixed (and
well worth the exposure).
All implementation details aside, I think we could make this
work, but I am hesitant to get involved with the UA in any
project since their agenda is funamentally different from
APO's (government/politics vs. service to the MIT community).
