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10/29/2004
Sure, Cornell sells other stuff online, such as computers, merchandise, and tickets. The school also recently entered into a partnership with Napster and Sony (www.sony.com), through which students can download from an archive of 800,000 digital songs for a minimal subscription fee. But Books? According to Margie Whiteleather, project manager for Cornell Business Services, they just aren’t in the plans anytime soon.
“There just hasn’t been a need for Cornell students to buy their books online,” Whiteleather explains. “Our student population is a resident population, and the most convenient service is for them to visually inspect the books in our store and choose which ones they’d like.”
As Whiteleather explains, instead of investing in etailing, Cornell employs
a mix of kiosks and user-friendly bookstore design to keep students coming
to the physical store. When a student visits the store, he or she uses a kiosk
to log into the school’s registration database, access a current course
schedule and a list of books required for those courses, and print the list
out for easy shopping.
It’s not that Cornell officials don’t have the resources to invest
in an etailing site for books; they just don’t think that kind of investment
is worthwhile. Tom Romantic, director of the school’s Business Services
division, says that Cornell students simply don’t want to shop for books
online, estimating that roughly 95 percent of students still buy their books
on site at the campus store. With such encouraging numbers, he adds, why change
a thing?
“We’re incredibly cautious about whether [selling books online] is really going to provide value to us or to faculty members,” he says. “It’s not because we’re lazy or stupid about online retailing. I just think we’ve seen others move too boldly in this direction and we’re trying to find a balance before we act.”
Of course, such interdepartmental efforts require total cooperation and full disclosure—two things that, in the collegiate environment, aren’t always easy to come by. At Cornell, for instance, Kevin Drake and Tom Romantic, director of Cornell Business Services, report that other departments are engaged in etailing efforts of their own; efforts that directly compete with the campus bookstore and actually cannibalize revenue. To wit: While the Cornell bookstore sells campus apparel online, the school’s Athletic Department offers it too, through an independent partnership with sports apparel maker Ivy Sport. As a result, Romantic says, bookstore merchandise sales are stunted at best, especially during basketball and football seasons.
Cannibalization from other departments isn’t the only challenge in the campus etailing world; some bookstore managers warn of etailing efforts cannibalizing their own sales in the brick-and-mortar store, as well. At Butte College, Pepperdine estimates that he loses hundreds of dollars in on-site “impulse sales” every day to his own Web site, where students log on to buy particular books. They buy the books and log off—no chance to be stopped by an enticing display. Pepperdine says some of the products that suffer most are personal items such as pens and candy, but adds that larger items such as school T-shirts and notebooks fall victim to the quick Web sales, too.
Organizations may have been slow to adopt Microsoft Windows Vista, but expect that to change by late 2008 to 2009, according to a Forrester Research report by Benjamin Gray et al., published last week.
Two Pennsylvania teaching colleagues with an interest in music and technology are bringing remote experts into classrooms at almost no cost, using Skype's free videoconferencing technology.
Columbia University has been beta testing its content through iTunes U, the Apple desktop media player for education-related podcasting. The New York-based university expects to go live with its release at the start of the fall semester.
Pursuing a strategy as a consumer of services and choice, Drexel University has partnered with both Google and Microsoft to provide students with massive e-mail mailboxes, gigabytes of file storage with collaboration tools, Web-based calendars, personal blogs, and more.
Pursuing a strategy as a consumer of services and choice, Drexel University has partnered with both Google and Microsoft to provide students with massive e-mail mailboxes, gigabytes of file storage with collaboration tools, Web-based calendars, personal blogs, and more.
Pursuing a strategy as a consumer of services and choice, Drexel University has partnered with both Google and Microsoft to provide students with massive e-mail mailboxes, gigabytes of file storage with collaboration tools, Web-based calendars, personal blogs, and more.
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