BookSwap is an open-source online marketplace that connects students on a given college campus to buy, sell, and save money on textbooks.
BookSwap provides:
- A beautifully simple interface for finding the books you need
- Automatic retrieval of courses and textbook requirements from campus bookstores websites
- Automatic retrieval of textbook metadata and cover images from Amazon
- A flexible authentication model for easy integration with campus authentication systems
BookSwap is built with BootStrap, CodeIgniter, and jQuery, and includes code from GetchaBooks.
- PHP 5.2.4 or newer
- MySQL 5.0 or newer
See the BookSwap wiki to learn how to set up BookSwap on your campus.
If you find a bug or think of a new feature for BookSwap, please create a new issue in our issue queue.
Also, we will gladly accept pull requests for bug fixes and enhancements!
The BookSwap project began at Northwestern University, and it is was it is today thanks to the hard work of many dedicated students and alumni over the years.
BookSwap is the brainchild of David Caratelli and Stephen Suellentrop, who came up with the idea for a campus-centric online textbook marketplace while they were students at NU. Together, they built the original BookSwap website, which launched at Northwestern in Fall 2010.
The original site owed much of its early success to Kate McGarrahan, who led graphic design and marketing.
In Winter 2011, mockups for a redesigned BookSwap were developed as part of a class project by a team of Northwestern computer-science students: Ethan Romba, Leif Foged, Steven Howard, and Eric Castillo.
Around the same time, Stephen, David, and Kate had begun working on a separate redesign effort with the help of several members from Northwestern's founding chapter of Design for America: Hannah Chung, Hansol Bang, Vincent FitzPatrick, Ruby Munjal, Michael Narea, Maxime Ollivier, and Uzair Qarni.
Ethan brought his team's insights to this larger redesign effort, and together they iterated on the new design throughout the spring based on feedback from several user testing sessions and focus groups.
Development of the new site finally began in Summer 2012 when Northwestern student Srinivas Balusu fleshed out a functional prototype under Ethan's guidance. David Harris, KC Chilamkurti, and Krish Suresh provided additional ideas and design feedback during this time. Ethan went on to build the final version of the site throughout the following winter (featuring a color scheme designed by Anthony del Gigante), and BookSwap "2.0" launched in March 2013.
Ethan open-sourced the code for the new BookSwap website in November 2013 so that college students everywhere can benefit from this incredible team effort and continue to build on their work for years to come.
BookSwap is released under the MIT License.
When launching your own BookSwap-powered site, you are encouraged to use the BookSwap name and logo, and to customize each to your needs.
Whether you use the entire BookSwap codebase or just bits and pieces, please help promote the project by adding a "Powered by BookSwap" (or similar) message on your site with a link to the BookSwap GitHub page.