A program at the University of Vermont is offering free textbooks to students, and there is no catch.

That’s what students usually ask first when they hear about Books4Equality, said Ben Kaufman, the CEO of the non-profit and a first-year graduate student studying natural resources at UVM.

Books4Equality is a free, non-profit library created at UVM with an online database for anyone to search, view and borrow donated books, he said.

Kaufman started Books4Equality with two friends, Alex Perkins and Javier Garcia-Bernardo, a little more than a year ago. The database currently holds about 1,800 books and other supplies, such as iClickers and calculators, Kaufman said.

“I was walking around campus, and I found a pile of old textbooks that said ‘free’ on them,” he said. “It just showed me that people don’t understand the value of their textbooks. They just see the price that the bookstore will give them — if they’ll give them any.”

The Books4Equality team has recently been working to get recognized as a student club at UVM, Kaufman said. Part of that process required them to find a faculty adviser.

Kaufman chose UVM’s bookstore manager, Jay Menninger, as Books4Equality’s adviser despite Kaufman’s original intent to remove the “middle man” in the buyback process, which in this case was the bookstore, he said.

“I don’t see them as competition. I see them as an additional option for students,” Menninger said. “If a student needs to sell the book back to our store for cash, that’s their decision. If they want to donate it to Books4Equality, that’s also their decision.”

 

Courtesy of Ben Kaufman

 

Menninger added that he was honored that the students chose him as their adviser. He said he had seen somewhat similar programs to Books4Equality before, but added that these students’ passion was different from those in the others.

The students had really done their research, Menninger said, and were doing it for no pay. Books4Equality also had no budget and received positive feedback from the students, Menninger added.

Kelly Molloy, the team’s social media and marketing director, said students are frequently caught off-guard when they find out that the program is truly free with no additional requirements.

“The response is overwhelmingly positive. During the tabling we get to really engage with the students, and they’re kind of blown away,” Molloy said. “It seems surprising that something like this hasn’t already been put in place at other universities with the mounting concerns about textbook prices, and it just makes sense to put our resources together to address the problem.”

Books4Equality has also worked on getting donation boxes in all of the residence halls at UVM, as well as initiating a donation competition between the fraternities and sororities on campus, said Connor Dermody, the team’s student outreach intern.

Looking forward, Books4Equality is welcome to opening new chapters at other universities, Kaufman said.

He added that he will not be reaching out to other universities because he doesn’t want to force the partnership, and he thinks that the program will work better if there are students on the campus that are passionate about seeing it through.

If the program expands, Molloy said the team will have to adjust its methods on social media to accommodate new chapters since its platform is currently centralized at UVM.

She added that it will be key for Books4Equality to get feedback from other schools’ social media staffs to find out what methods work best for their respective university.

“The reason it’s doing as well as it is on our campus is because the guys who started it were enthusiastic and they really care about it. That’s what it takes,” Menninger said. “I hope other people give it a try.”

Published on February 17, 2016 at 11:11 pm

Contact BreeAnna: blposhek@syr.edu