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« Wes Anderson's AT&T ads | Main | Juvenile Lit! » Wednesday, September 19, 2007NOTE: Don't take notes at the CoopPoor bookstores! If you sell new books, you just can't compete with the Internet any more. Before a new title even hits the shelves, someone is sure to sell it online at a discount -- thanks, in no small part, to book reviewers who sell their advance copies. Amazon.com promotes the sale of used copies of new titles on the same page as those new titles. So what does the Harvard Coop do when its employees notice that Harvard students are visiting the required-course-reading shelves, writing down ISBN info, and leaving without making a purchase? Kick those kids out, that's what! In a Harvard Crimson story published yesterday, Harvard junior Jarret A. Zafran complains that he was asked to leave the Coop after writing down the prices of books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial. "I'm a junior and every semester I do the same thing. I go and look up the author and the cost and order the ones that are cheaper online and then go back to the Coop to get the rest," Zafran says. Exactly the kind of rational economic behavior freshmen learn to appreciate in Harvard's famously free-marketarian Ec10 course, right? Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:19 AM
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