CheapestTextbooks.com was started back in 2001 when our founder Chris Manns was starting college at Old Dominion University. He had spoke to a friend about the best way to get cheap textbooks. His friend gave him the name of several textbook sites and told him to go to each one individually in order to price comparison shop.
It was at this time that Chris thought, “Hey, why don’t I make something that will do that?”. Chris had to pick out a domain that best reflected what he wanted the site to be. After many searches for available domains, he came across CheapestTextbooks.com and registered it in the spring of 2001.
Chris being an engineer and not a programmer launched the site in the summer of 2001 as a textbook coupon site. He used Microsoft Front Page to make the one page textbook coupon website.
The coupon website was always going to be just a stepping stone to a textbook price comparison website. As the year continued, Chris was on the lookout for a programmer that was highly skilled and willing to work on a meager budget. After talking with different people Chris found a friend of his that was married to a NASA Computer Engineer. Within just a few months, she had a price comparison website up and running. We still work with her company today.
Fast forward to the summer of 2004. The website had been ticking along just fine until one day we had a huge increase in traffic. We found out later that an article in Money Magazine was written about our website. It stated that CheapestTextbooks.com was the best place to help students find the cheapest textbooks. Once the word got out, there was a windfall of media coverage. Since then, we’ve been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News, Consumer Reports, Buzzfeed and Clark Howard to name a few.
Speaking of recommendations, we obviously love them. Interested in helping us spread the word? Your friends and or students will love you for it. We even have banners and a price comparison widget that you can add to your website.
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