BookRenter.com delivers a sustainable business
Colin Barceloux
OMIS '03
Colin Barceloux has a vivid memory of walking into Benson Center during his student days at Santa Clara University and seeing a huge stack of used textbooks shown as having zero buyback value. Even then, it didn’t seem right to him.
“It struck me that students were paying hundreds of dollars for textbooks that they only used for three months,” he said. “There was a market inefficiency that was turning what essentially was a short-term rental into an expensive purchase.”
Several years later, Barceloux, who graduated in 2003 with a degree in Operations and Management Information Systems, acted on that “aha!” moment by launching BookRenter.com, now the nation’s premier online textbook rental business.
Offering textbook rentals for periods of 30 to 125 days, BookRenter.com does business all around the country, saving students as much as 75 percent over the purchase price on textbooks. With a typical textbook costing more than $100 and some going as high as $500, that’s serious money.
And while the business is growing rapidly, Barceloux said there’s plenty of room for future expansion given that it now has only a sliver of the nation’s 18 million college students as customers. The market for rentals is particularly good, he said, in community colleges and commuter schools, where tuition is lower and books comprise a higher part of the cost of education.
A key element of the success of BookRenter.com has been its partnership with Amazon.com, enabling it to take advantage of the internet book giant’s warehousing and distribution systems. Considerable effort went into establishing that.
“Basically I was very persistent,” Barceloux said. “When you are a startup, it takes a lot of phone calls and e-mails to establish contact with a company that’s much bigger than you.”
That partnership enabled BookRenter.com to offer speedy delivery, which turned out to be a critical to the company’s success.
“One of the biggest surprises was how quickly people wanted the books,” he said. “We knew price would be important, but we had to couple that with fast delivery. Now, 95 percent of the books we rent go out the next business day.”
Starting his own online business is in line with what Barceloux had in mind when he decided to go to Santa Clara. There was a family connection with SCU because his grandfather, Reeve Barceloux (’36) had played for the Broncos’ football team, but what he really wanted was the business education and Silicon Valley connections that would eventually help him go out on his own. After graduation he worked in online advertising for Google and for an online advertising startup, Decide Interactive, before deciding to take the plunge with his own business.
He cited two examples of how the Santa Clara education helped in that regard. The software design for the business is a direct outgrowth of what he was taught in Professor Charles Feinstein’s OMIS class, and the advice and introductions he got through Kevin Holmes, Director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, were critical in getting the business off the ground.
BookRenter.com has built its business by making sure it shows up on search engines and through old-fashioned word-of-mouth.
“I believe if you have a good product or service, it will sell itself,” Barceloux said. “When college students find something beneficial, they talk about it among themselves.”
BookRenter.com is beneficial in ways that relate to the two core values of the company, he said. One is the green aspect. “I fundamentally believe that renting books is good for the environment, because it reduces the number of trees that get cut.”
The other core value is that everyone should have access to higher education, and costs should not be prohibitive.
“I’ve seen surveys showing that 65 percent of all college students at some point didn’t buy a textbook because of the cost,” Barceloux said. “Making education affordable is a paramount part of our brand.”
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