Thanks for all the comments. Declaration of interest: I'm a co-founder of Crimson Reading.

Re: comment #28 by spoon: Crimson Reading donates all profits (which come from referral commission) to help build a school in Zambia. We're not making any money from this. Re: comment #22 also by spoon, we are willing to put in the work: we get ISBNs from syllabi where possible, but most syllabi don't publish ISBN, edition or publisher so we need to get the information from The Coop.

Re: comment #23 by neon: Yes, the administration have made clear they will not support our efforts to setup a 'book information system' that would gather ISBNs from faculty and distribute to The Coop, Harvard College Library, Crimson Reading and elsewhere. The relationship between The Coop and Harvard administrators is very cosy.

Re: comment #11 by rob: an ISBN is not protected by copyright law; it's a fact. A collection of ISBNs *can* be protected by copyright law if it the collation of those ISBNs had creative input. In this case, the professors own copyright over the reading list for their course, not The Coop. The Coop does not own the intellectual property. They do have a legal right to evict students from the store, but they cannot claim they own the ISBN numbers.

Its been a fascinating week for us. We're just trying to save students some money on textbooks. We're not profiting from this operation. We are lobbying more professors to provide us with this information next semester. This semester only 20% responded to our requests... in the meantime, the only place we can find the ISBN number, or the edition/publisher, for assigned readings is The Coop.

I've read this thread with interest. I started the Crimson Reading program at Harvard last September, and have spent much of the past year thinking about these issues.

First of all, thanks for all your comments. Just when I thought I was the only person who thought ISBN numbers were interesting...!

Comment #5 posted by jccalhoun is right: Feist v Rural said a collection of facts, like a list of 10 ISBN numbers assigned for a particular course, can be copyrighted. In this case, however, it is the professors who assemble the collection of ISBN numbers and send it to the bookstore, and therefore the professors own the copyright. The bookstore cannot exercise any ownership (or protection) of that intellectual property.

Comment #11 posted by drewstarr is also right: the bookstore has every right to eject us from their premises, and therefore they can stop us from writing down the ISBN numbers. That is the legal basis for The Coop's new policy.

Comment #12 posted by jccalhoun raises an interesting point. The Coop is a cooperative bookstore owned by its members, largely students. We could, in theory, elect student representatives to The Coop's board and lobby for a change in policy. Stay tuned.

Comment #14 posted by bcrowell suggests the cost savings for students buying online is small. An analysis of our spring 2007 data shows The Coop's prices are on average 23% higher than the cheapest online prices. It's understandable why, and some students are happy to pay the premium for the convenience.

Also in response to bcrowell, comment #19: yes ISBN numbers are easy to find; and yes, we are now using course syllabi and isbndb.com... but multiple that by 2300 books, and suddenly sneaking into The Coop seems much more appealing!

The solution, as pork musket hints at in #3, is for university administrators to politely request that campus bookstores publish an open source database of ISBN numbers - not because they have to, but because it's the right thing to do.

In the meantime, we're appealing for students to engage in civil disobedience by emailing us the ISBN numbers for the books they've already bought from The Coop... crowd-sourcing at its very best.