Both local and national Web sites are giving local bookstores competition in the used book business.

Local site PSUstuff.com and national company UsedBookBroker.com offer students a forum for buying and selling used books.

Aaron Leese (junior-electrical engineering) created PSUstuff.com after becoming disgruntled over the prices of the books at the local bookstores. He now serves as the site’s Webmaster and is happy with its progress.

"There were 1,000 hits Sunday, which was the most ever for a single day. Before break it was about 200 a day," Leese said.

To use this free service to sell books, students type in the title, author, edition, original price and asking price of their book, as well as how they can be contacted.

To buy a book, a student can search the database of books listed and contact the person selling the book they wish to buy. More than 600 books are listed.

Six of these books are listed by Matt Fiore (freshman-information science and technology).

"The site is pretty popular with people I know," Fiore said. "I think it’s pretty good."

Although Fiore is trying to sell his books on the site, he has not used it to buy any books.

"I bought my books mostly from friends and other people I knew," Fiore said.

DeAnn Snider (sophomore-public relations and speech communications) discovered PSUstuff.com when she saw a flyer hanging in her dorm lobby. She said she would have listed her books if she knew about the site before she sold them to the bookstore.

"I was really disappointed," Snider said. "I would really try to stay away from the bookstores. They’re not fair. They don’t give you a good amount of money compared to what you pay in the first place. It’s ridiculous."

Snider said she is a fan of the Web site because “students can benefit from buying each other’s books rather than the bookstore.”

UsedBookBroker.com, with over 45,000 listings, is a site with about 75 times more books listed than PSUstuff.com. The Cambridge, Mass. company has been in business for about five months.

Clay Kallman, co-founder and president of UsedBookBroker.com, said the Web site is "particularly popular" at Penn State.

Part of this popularity could be because students can use Daily Jolt (www.dailyjolt.com) as well as UsedBookBroker.com to access the service.

"We use all 105 Daily Jolt schools," Kallman said. "Their entire network is joined with ours. We split all fees generated from traffic that comes from them."

To buy a book through UsedBookBroker.com, a student may request the textbook from three potential sellers. The first seller to respond receives the address of the buyer and mails the book directly. The service tracks the book as it is mailed and transfers payment from the buyer to the seller.

In order to use the service, each student must provide a credit card number.

"There have been a lot of people wanting to pay by checks, but it’s not a secure method of the seller getting paid. Using credit cards is fraud prevention method to prevent students from signing up as other people. It’s also an identifying method," Kallman said.

Kallman assures that all information is kept confidential on a separate Web site.

When asked about competition from local bookstores, Kallman said they are "just as competitive as the textbook market. The problem is that they use a very inefficient distribution method. Each step of the way, they mark the book up. That was the impetus for creating UsedBookBroker."

Local bookstore managers said they are not worried about losing profits to Web sites.

"It’s basically a migration of the old book swap," said Tom Fankhauser, assistant store manager at the Penn State Bookstore.

"On a campus this big, this has been around for a while. The student government did the same thing. They would set up tables in the HUB. There is no reason for us to do anything. We’re not against it," Fankhauser said.

The first few days of the semester, the Penn State Bookstore bought back between 500 and 1000 books a day, compared to the 100 books sold on PSUstuff.com in the last month. Fankhauser said students are likely to sell their books to the bookstore when they need the cash right away and have no luck selling their books online.

Fiore said he might eventually sell his books back to the bookstore if he has no buyers.

Norm Brown, manager at the Student Book Store, 330 E. College Ave., said although the Web sites are another competitor, he has not seen any effects in sales.

"The best way to combat (the Web sites) has been our reservation service. It has been a real winner for us. Anytime where there are other sources, the books change with editions. We make sure students are buying the right books," Brown said.

Meanwhile, Leese is expanding his site to include other items and is looking for corporate sponsorship.

"I want to make it a free classified ad service for this area. It would keep people coming back most of the year," Leese said.