As anybody who’s had to purchase college textbooks in the last several years knows, they can be quite the hassle. Not only do their already-steep prices keep rising, but getting rid of them at the end of the semester isn’t always easy.
Amazon Student, a new iPhone app that launched today, aims to help ease some of that pain by giving students a way to shop for textbooks and other items and sell them back via their smartphone.
These are things that have long been possible through sites like Amazon and Half.com, but this mobile app makes the process even easier by putting a barcode scanner and price comparison database in the pockets of students, including while they’re in the campus bookstore, where prices tend to be the highest.
The Amazon Student app will look and feel very familiar to customers who have used the company’s standard iPhone app. It’s essentially the same thing, but with a more student-specific focus and an emphasis on selling items through Amazon’s Trade-In program.
As with purchasing items, the reselling process utilizes a barcode scanner so students can take a picture of the barcode of the item they want to sell and quickly add it to their queue of items to trade in. Students can then print a shipping label, send the item out and will then receive an Amazon gift card for the amount the item sold for.
The app isn’t just for textbooks. Students can buy and resell just about anything, including DVDs, video games and electronics.
