If Minji Ong ’08 has his way, you will be selling your textbooks at the end of next semester to him. That, at least, is the aim of the newly formed group WesEntrepreneurs, a business venture organization created by Ong and Iwan Djanali ’09. They have launched a project called WesBooks, which seeks to compete with Broad Street Books by offering better prices for students’ textbooks. The proceeds from their sales, organizers say, will go to IMPACT, a Wesleyan-based organization that provides microfinancing services in Nepal.
“There are two groups of people, one that is socially conscious and the other that has financial reasons to get something back [monetarily],” Ong, who is the group’s business development consultant, said. “Next semester, we hope to address this [latter] group. We really need people now to help save us costs in the short-term and donate books.”
Members of WesEntrepreneurs will be going around the campus during reading week soliciting students to donate their books. In so doing, the group hopes to raise the capital now to launch their initiative next semester. They hope that the charitable mandate of the project will attract support from the student body.
“We feel that IMPACT’s cause is in line with our goal; that is to provide business opportunities, however small, to everyone who needs them,” Djanali, who is the executive officer of the group, said. “IMPACT will donate its proceeds for microfinanc[ing] in Nepal. We also have a similarity in terms of the sizes of our groups and, since IMPACT has been established for a longer period at Wesleyan, WesEnt could definitely learn a lot from IMPACT.”
Although the group members have many ideas and plans for the future, they have faced some obstacles since the creation of WesEntrepreneurs. They initially wanted money from the Student Budgetary Committee, but that became a difficult task.
“Even at the founding stage, we have a lot of problems,” Ong said.
Two members even quit because of troubles getting financing from the SBC. According to Ong and Djanali, the members had trouble establishing their not-for-profit status and, in the end, they did not request funding.
Nonetheless, WesEntrepreneurs has lofty ambitions; looking at services it might provide with regards to student transportation to New Haven online surveys to help students conduct research more easily. The group is also planning to hold a for-credit seminar next spring in business and publicize the group more aggressively to attract new members.
Most of the members, with the exception of Ong, apparently come to WesEntrepreneurs with little actual business experience. In this regard, their advisor, Director of the Career Resource Center Michael Sciola provides great support, according to Ong.
“Personally, I’m really interested in entrepreneurship despite the fact that it may not be my future career choice and the different aspects of entrepreneurship—market analysis, cooperation, trust, etc., that are important life skills,” Djanali said.
Ong, while a sophomore, is a 25-year-old from Singapore, where he has been involved in numerous business ventures. He hopes to bring his experience to the group to help make its projects into sustainable business enterprises, focusing primarily in the next year on WesBooks, their textbook buyback-and-sell concept.
“[The bookstore] is cutting us off in a number of ways,” Ong said. “The books are too expensive and the buyback is bad.”
But Nancy Healy, manager of Broad Street Books, has a different take on Ong’s assessment. In her mind, it is the market and the prohibitive cost of textbook production, distribution, and shipping that is responsible for most of the ticker price. As far as the buyback prices, Healy insists that much of that is dictated by the decisions professors make in book selection.
“Textbook prices in of themselves are inflated, but not from the retail side,” Healy said. “It is very expensive to produce textbooks. What we make on the profit margin is only around four percent. Our buyback prices are probably better than most because [Follett Higher Education Group] owns over 700 campus store locations.”
Healy is not worried about the prospects of a competitor, noting the complexity and difficulty of the textbook distribution business.
“I’m not sure if [WesEntrepreneurs] is going to aggressively affect the pricing of textbooks,” Healy said. “We want to make textbooks as affordable as we can, give students as much money back as possible.”
The group, however, is adamant that they can provide a better service than the bookstore and for a better cause.
“Why not have your textbooks bought for much more and have the funds go to charity?” Ong said.