Random Musings:

Renting Textbooks

It's no secret that the college textbook publishing business is in trouble. The declinging economy, student and faculty resistance to high prices of new text books, and the used textbook market are among the factors making life difficult for publishers. Now, according to a NYTimes article, publishers are having their base business attacked by textbook rentals. 

Chegg.com is a venture back startup that is building a growing business renting textbooks to college students.

With demand for good deals on textbooks running high, Chegg’s success comes in large part from being able to address those inefficiencies. While Chegg primarily rents books, it is also essentially acting as a kind of “market maker,” gathering books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. That provides liquidity to the market, said Yannis Bakos, associate professor of management at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Information Commerce 1997 - Scenario Mapping Changes Beliefs

As noted, my former colleagues at NCRI created a form of scenario planning called Future Mapping that improved upon scenario processes pioneered in the business world by Royal Dutch Shell. I was the founder of a series of public workshops on the the Future of Information Commerce that were held in the early 1990s. After my departure for Silicon Valley, my former colleagues continued the workshop. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I've been reviewing selected results from a 1997 edition of the workshop. The full original report is here; a presentation (PDF) on the Scenario Mapping(tm) process is here.

Public workshop participants are asked to rank the Endstates in terms of Desirability and Attainability. Each person is assigned to a team which analyzes their assigned Endstate and then delivers a 15-20 minute presentation that explains how the world got to be that way. Following all the team presentations, participants are asked to re-rank the Endstates.