With college students around the country heading back to school in the coming weeks, the hunt for cheap textbooks is on. If you’ve ever spent a couple hundred collars on a single book, only to read a few chapters and put the book back on the shelf, then you know the unique sticker shock that comes with shopping for text books each semester.
A new iPhone app by Half.com could help students quickly find cheap alternatives to college bookstores with barcode scanning and and the ability to purchase items directly from the iPhone app.
Half.com is an Ebay-owned company that specializes in books, DVDS, CDs, video games and more, with many of the products – as indicated by the name – offered at 50% of the original retail price. According to the company’s release, the majority of items sold on Half.com are textbooks.
The app, just released for the iPhone and available for free in the App Store, has a number of useful features, most notably barcode scanning. The app also saves payment and shipping information to make buying through the app more seamless. Users of the app can set standard criteria for their searches, such as the condition of the item and seller feedback, limiting search results to just those items they might purchase.
The integration of barcode scanning is a first for Ebay’s mobile apps and follows a June acquisition of iPhone barcode scanning application RedLaser.
Take a look at the video for some highlights on an app we’re willing to bet will explode in popularity among the college student population in the coming days and weeks.
