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TAYLORSVILLE — When Alan Martin founded campusbookrentals.com seven years ago, he did it so students could avoid campus bookstores altogether and go online to get their books for less.
Today, Martin’s business continues to evolve, and it has students going back to the bookstore for their books, while still saving them money.
The idea in 2007 was simple: buy books from outside sources and build a huge inventory in all subjects. Then rent the books at a discount and include a pre-paid padded envelope for easy return.
In the first six months of operation, the company was serving students primarily in Utah.
Then with word of mouth, orders started coming in from 4,000 campuses across the country.
In 2012, the company expanded and moved into a warehouse in Ogden to store more books to meet the demand. By then, the company was one of the fastest growing in the country with revenues close to $30 million.
While business was good, Martin knew that someday he would need the campus bookstores to survive.
“We realized pretty quickly that if we were going to have the biggest impact on the industry and bring the most savings to the most students, it would happen at the college store,” Martin said.
The company, which was renamed "Sidewalk" has developed software that runs kiosks, like the ones at Salt Lake Community College, in about 350 campus stores across the country.
The student finds the book off the store shelf and scans it at the kiosk. They see how much it costs to rent the book, pay with a credit card or through financial aid. Then they walk out the door with rented book in hand.
Martin said being back in the bookstore was important because more than half the students in this country are on some form of financial aid and their money is only good inside the college bookstore.
There's so many students on campus who need their books today and not tomorrow, the college store felt like the place to be.
–Alan Martin, Sidewalk founder
“There’s so many students on campus who need their books today and not tomorrow, the college store felt like the place to be,” he said.
The idea is also good for the bookstore’s bottom line.
“It's really good for the bookstore because we buy the book from the store, so they get a sale, just as if they had sold it to the student, except we pay the full price and the student pays the rental price and then goes out the door," Martin said.
The kiosk technology is in more than 300 bookstores now.
Others have gotten into textbook rentals too. Amazon stopped selling to Martin several years ago and is now in the rental game.
The New York Times, impressed with Martin's vision that essentially changed the college textbook industry, featured him in an article a couple of days ago.
So what's the future? Get more kiosks into the campus bookstores. Martin said while traditional textbooks will be around for some time, digital versions are not far away.
“So our goal is to get our technology in as many stores as possible, so when digital comes, we can turn this relationship into a digital relationship,” Martin said.
He said this technology could be tailored for use in other retail operations. But for now, it's all about books. And who says, books are dead?
Contributing: Viviane Vo-Duc
