Unibookworm - students recycling unwanted books: Review

Unibookworm is an ideal innovation for students who want to sell their unwanted books and instruction booklets that are no longer needed. Perhaps, as a student, you have finished a course or exam and have no need to keep the text books that helped you through that course. But you can bet your bottom dollar there will be another student out there somewhere, who is just starting on the same course you have just completed, and is desperately trying to source the very text books you have, and no longer need.

If you are about to embark on a new course, you can access Unibookworm to see if the books for your next course appear on the app, often at a price much lower than you’ll find at the local student campus book shop. You can even swap books for free; if you have a book you no longer need and another student has a need for them, why not swap between students who may have completed the course you are just about to go on.

Once you have finished with your books from college or university you need only use the ISBN feature to upload the details of your book and the app automatically updates its database. If the ISBN details are not recognized and fail to appear on the Unibookworm database, then simply take a snapshot of the book using the app camera button function.

You can enter the details of the book manually if you wish, or the database does not have your book details to hand. Let us say you are searching for a text book you need you will enter just the keyword, title, author or ISBN number and the database will show all the matches it has on its file. If there is no such match then enter all the details of the book into the “Wanted” section. Here every seller that has a book to sell can check the wanted section and see if there are any students searching for the very book they have.

The app is designed for students within the UK only and pupils can create a profile page which includes details like their email address, university they are attending, courses they are studying and interests. Using this facility it is possible to contact other students via secure messaging service. Here you can make the necessary arrangement to pay for the books. Unibookworm does not handle payments, so you’ll have to use a service such as Barclays Pingit to send or receive money via your mobile phone.