Missed class? No problem. Notes are available, for a price, of

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Oct 14, 2005 by Ben Mook

Taking notes in class, a dreaded necessity for some in order to pass, provides an additional revenue stream for one local bookseller, which pays students for their notes and then offers them for sale to others.

Bookholders.com, located on the outskirts of the University of Maryland, College Park, gets about 90 percent of its revenue from buying and selling used textbooks online and at its store. The remaining 10 percent comes from the company's commercial note- taking business, including Terp Notes, where college students are paid to take notes in class. These notes are then offered to other students who need them, for any number of reasons

It's pretty simple, we hire people in classes to take notes and we sell them to other students. Bookholders.com manager and University of Maryland alumnus Louis Verde said. The customers are students who maybe missed a class, or maybe they just need some extra before a test.

Bookholders.com was started in 1999 by Verde's brother John Verde and two silent partners, all University of Maryland alumni. Bookholders.com now has 20 employees and remains a family business.

With its core business of selling used textbooks, Bookholders.com is in a very competitive market, going head to head with the university's own bookstore and other off-campus resellers. To help add revenue and extend business past the initial rush at the beginning of the semester when students scramble to get the books they need, Bookholders.com added commercial note taking.

Just at the time when the book sales start to slow down, Terp Notes sales kick in, he said. It's been an extra source of income for us. We have been able to find a niche, doing what we do.

The note takers come from the classes themselves where students are paid anywhere from $8 to $20 per class for their notes. The classes covered are generally larger lectures and run the gamut of the university's departments, from family studies to criminal justice and architecture to sociology.

The notes are typed to ensure legibility. Bookholders.com then sells the notes to students at $2.50 per class. There is also an option to buy a semester's worth of notes for under $30, according to the Bookholders.com Web site.

The company has had to tiptoe around the legal issue of copyright violation. When commercial note-taking services peaked in popularity during the late '90s dot-com craze, a host of companies tried to merge class notes with paid advertising.

At the time, universities fired off cease-and-desist letters, and the courts handed down mixed rulings over who owns the rights to notes taken in class. While things have cooled off since then and the industry is now more of a cottage one, Bookholders.com remains keenly aware of legal limitations.

The list of note takers is kept confidential to prevent the professors from knowing who in their class is selling the notes. Also, each Terps Note page ends with a disclaimer that the notes are not an exact transcription of what was said.

We stress that the notes are the note takers' impressions of what was said in class, not a verbatim transcript, Verde said. We are very aware of the copyright laws.

Seeing their name on the list of classes offered comes as a surprise to some University of Maryland professors and teachers. Jennifer Runnels, a graduate student, said it threw her for a loop, when she learned last week that notes from the contemporary moral issues philosophy class she teaches were for sale from Terp Notes. She learned about it after taking a day off and finding a student passing out copies of notes from an earlier class.

Apparently, they were trying to entice some more customers, Runnels said. I'm not upset about it; it's actually been more amusing than anything.

Runnels said she looked at the notes taken in her class, and in others, and it has given her a new vantage point into how the material is presented. Unfortunately, Runnels said, relying on another student's interpretation of classroom material might not always be the best plan for success.

When I learned about this service, I warned my students to use the notes at their own risk, and maybe their own detriment, Runnels said. They laughed, but I've seen the quality of some of the notes, and they were pretty bad.