0Yesterday I wrote about why university bookstores should get out of the bookselling business, and Zach Whalen chimed in with some much needed details that I'd completely overlooked. It doesn't quite get me to change my mind about getting out of the bookselling business, but it does point me to some better thinking about what we'd really be getting at.

0The basic idea I started with is that, just as information is no longer difficult to find, books are no longer difficult to find, and so the service that university bookstores provide of helping students obtain their books is outdated. What Zach pointed out gets at the larger economic ecosystem at work, at least at large schools where indy bookstores also provide that service. There's an important network of teachers using their real power of pushing sales to a particular store to support it. I like that, and wouldn't want it to go away completely. But, just as I'm imagining the university bookstore changing and adapting, the indy stores would need to, as well. For all of them, the really crucial thing is something that I didn't pay enough attention to yesterday -- the service of a student going to the bookstore with a list of their classes and the bookstore giving them a nice tidy package for them to pick up. Keep that--call it a university bookservice.

0Here's a few half-baked scenarios that I imagine moving in that direction.

01. Two people discover that they are teaching the same work of literature, but in editions from different publishers. So the next semester, they get together and agree on one that they both like well enough. Economies of scale for the bookstores, hopefully passed on to students.

02. Moving into the bookstore as a service model. . . a teacher has all their required books listed, and has also made an arrangement with their favorite bookservice to send students their way. That concentrates the economies of scale on one service, so the bookservice might be able to negotiate an even better deal than the deals the students would get individually. But it also lets the students do their own comparison shopping in case the bookservice can't get a better deal. Any of the students who want to use the service just send them a link to their FOAF file or their OpenID, and a link to the URI of the course -- hopefully the bookservice is working on a web interface for this. That gives all the data needed for the bookservice to make the tidy boxes of books for that course.

03. Expand scenario 2 out a bit to many bookservices working with the public book info for courses. Pulling all that data across courses together, they can negotiate with their distributors for better deals (or at least likely deals, depending on how many students go with that bookservice) they can offer the students, and publish that data back so that students can compare likely prices across many bookservices.

04. If scenario 3 starts getting competitive enough, processing all that data will call for new computer applications to be written for bookservices, maybe by some fantastic company with longstanding experience with book data, university courses, and the semantic web. Sounds like a lot to ask for in a company -- just how Talis that order? :)