Every student knows the struggle that is buying text books. Whether it’s the process it takes to find the right textbook or the sometimes scant amount of money textbooks are bought back for, the headaches they cause aren’t worth the trouble.
David Miller, CEO of SlugBooks, was no stranger to the beast that is textbooks shopping. While a student at U.C. Santa Cruz, Miller joined his school’s co-op, Slug Books Co-op.
“The person in charge of finance was leaving, so I applied and I joined,” Miller said. “A little while afterwards it became pretty clear that business wasn’t as sustainable as it was when it first started 10 years prior to that.”
With a business model that was designed to undercut the bookstore on campus, the student run co-op was able to operate without any overhead management from his university, according to Miller.
“The downside of being run by students is there’s a lot of turnover,” Miller said. “In the 10 years that the co-op had been around, websites like Amazon had risen to the scene.”
According to Miller, it be came increasingly difficult to offer competitive prices to students who couldn’t afford books at the bookstore. Originally the cheaper option, Slug Books Co-op had to begin competing with websites that were selling textbooks much cheaper then the co-op could afford.
“Eventually the co-op went out of business and I graduated,” Miller said. “The fact that we had failed, though, and had to shut down never really sat well with me.”
It was Miller’s unhappiness with the co-op’s failure that motivated him to found www.slugbooks.com in 2008.
“There was this idea of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, from a competitive stand point,” Miller said. “I soon became aware of affiliate marketing and that you can actually provide links to these products on the same website that the co-op was competing with. It’s sort of providing the best of both worlds in a pure online experience.”
With the simple mission of trying to save students money when buying textbooks, SlugBooks doesn’t actually sell anything. Simply a source of information, it organizes textbook pricing websites in what Miller described as an easy way to digest.
“It gets very competitive at the beginning of every semester,” Miller said. “You never know if a site is going to be more competitive or less competitive unless you’re looking at all of the prices. Transparency is really the differentiator that we provide.”
According to Miller, the success of SlugBooks was never really expected.
“In theory it makes a lot of sense that something that is so useful and free would be come very popular,” Miller said. “The goal was never really to go national or international. In the first year we were really only focused on California. We were focused on helping the students that I thought we had really let down when the co-op closed.”
Though Slugbooks was originally specific to U.C. Santa Cruz and its mascot, the banana slug, it is now being used by students in various states and Toronto, according to Miller.
In the past few years, SlugBooks has taken a step in the direction of animation with their line of featured animated textbooks.
“There’s a sort of animated feel when you come to our homepage,” Miller said. “Every time you go to our homepage there’s a different featured textbook pointing to the search box. If you scroll all the way to the bottom [of the page] we have all these different characters interacting with each other.”
Miller said SlugBooks is trying to find a way to use YouTube to reach out with its brand and keep students engaged during the various times of the year when they aren’t shopping for textbooks.
“It’s a really weird space to be in,” Miller said. “Imagine that you have a job but you only get two paychecks a year. When you’re a textbook company, you’re great and you’re helping people but how do you stay on their minds six months until they need you again?”
