Critics' choice

Book reviews are a fact of literary life that mass-market authors are inured to, but textbook writers have long avoided. No more. The Campus Bookstore at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, has added a popular new feature to its Web site (www.campusbookstore.com/queens) that allows students to review their texts online.

The hope is that professors, when adopting books for their courses, will take into consideration students' concerns about certain texts. The idea resulted from a survey of students conducted by the bookstore--a non-- profit enterprise run by the school's engineering students--which found that 75 percent of students wanted a dance to criticize the texts they were assigned.

The survey also determined that the main irritant was not expensive books but costly books that were seldom used or that were badly done. "Our mantra is that good books aren't expensive, but poor books are," explains Christopher Tabor, the shop's general manager. Still, price can be an issue, especially for engineering and medical students. "They get hammered by book prices," Tabor admits. He recalls one engineering text that cost $300, and it's not unusual for engineering students to spend as much as $1,400 a year on books.

Tabor was fearful that students would use the site--which went online in June--to launch into tirades. But that hasn't happened. "Most of our results are remarkably mature," he notes. It's too early say if professors will use the input in guiding their choices, but Tabor thinks they will.

And now other campus bookshops have begun to borrow the idea. To assist them, the Queen's University store has set up a generic version at www.reviewmytextbooks.org that can be easily downloaded. Tabor says he's sincerely flattered by the virtual imitations.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Sep 2000
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