undefined | Better HN

story

0 pointsanamexis10y ago0 comments

I'll take this opportunity to plug my current employer, Verba Software. We work with college bookstores to make textbooks cheaper, from making it easy for professors to find cheaper alternatives when they are adopting textbooks, to helping the bookstore source cheap used textbooks, to helping students find the cheapest books through transparent comparison shopping.

http://www.verbasoftware.com/

0 comments

ethbro10y ago

I always thought crowd-sourced feedback on whether a class + instructor combination required the textbook would be incredibly useful.

A) There are 20+ students in typical undergraduate classes

B) Professors tend to teach undergraduate classes extremely similarly from year-to-year

So I imagine it wouldn't take long until I could plug in a school, class, and professor and get a list of impressions back. E.g. "Homework taken directly from book"

Second idea. OCR + diff would be incredibly valuable for version diffs of popular textbooks. How much was rewritten? Were the homework questions changed? If so, which ones?

Thanks for the good work though!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse