Out in Kalamazoo this weekend there is a Startup Weekend event.

One of the more interesting ideas from this event that became a website is beerfortextbooks. It is also sometimes seen as beer4textbooks. It appears that the idea is to create a marketplace where people can find what buyers, usually large book sellers, are paying for the book the student is done with and selling.

College students understand beer and the price of it. This website converts the used book marketplace price into units of beer. It’s my assumption that is to make the site fun, unique and or different from similar websites. There was some chatter from at least one ad person that I consider to be knowledgeable and respected in the industry. They acknowledged the idea and expressed interest in it. One never knows where that will lead.

Below is a partial screen shot of the results for a book I found on Amazon and submitted to see if and how the system worked. Results were Google like. The result below seemed to appear in just a second or two.

Book used: Campbell Biology (9th Edition) [Hardcover]