College students’ biannual hunt for textbooks may have just gotten easier.

Senior Kamal Mohamed’s new website, underbooks.com, provides students with price comparisons from their school’s bookstore as well as various online book distributors such as Amazon and Half.com.

“The process is streamlined. All you need to know is your professor’s name,” Mohamed said. “It’s like a KAYAK.com for books.”

Mohamed said the website’s price comparison model is not the first, but his goal was to make the book-purchasing process as easy as possible for students.

“You can do it in a fraction of the time in comparison to other [price comparison] sites,” he said. “It’s so much faster.”

The site features every MIAC school except the College of Saint Benedict, but Mohamed said St. Ben’s will eventually be added as well. The site also includes the University of Minnesota, University of Minnesota-Duluth and Concordia University in St. Paul.

When students click on their school, they are directed to majors, professors and eventually course book lists and prices. Mohamed said in the future he would consider expanding to other schools, but wanted to create an exclusive feel for Minnesota students to get the site off the ground.

“Something about it being exclusive creates a buzz,” he said. “I want other schools to want it, for it to be an event to come to their school.”

Mohammed said that with the development process complete and the site up and running, all the course book lists and prices will update in real time, including affiliate sites such as Amazon and Half.com. He said the site is an improvement on student book exchange sites, and that aspect is only a supplementary part of underbooks.com.

“[The book exchange] is like soft drinks at Chipotle,” Mohammed said. “You wouldn’t go just for that, but we have it on the side.”

Entrepreneurship professor Mark Spriggs said the nature of the used book market could make it difficult for Mohammed.

“There’s so many big players out there. There’s just so many competitors that it’s a tough business to run,” Spriggs said. “It’s pretty hard to differentiate yourself.”

But Spriggs said running a business as a student can be very valuable.

“A lot of these are just good learning experiences,” he said. “Learning what it is to be an entrepreneur and along will come a bigger idea that will become more sustainable.”

Mohammed said the website hasn’t started advertising yet and is mostly relying on word-of-mouth.

Some students said the site would be a helpful resource.

Senior Nick Bussa has been on the site and said he would have appreciated the services when he was a freshman or sophomore.

“It just gives students so many more tools when they’re trying to find textbooks,” he said. “It would have made it a lot cheaper for me to buy books.”

Bussa also said students could potentially use it to make decisions on which classes they take.

“You can tell even before you sign up for classes what books your class would need and how much it would cost,” he said.

Senior Tom Broich also said he would have liked to have the website available when he was a younger student and imagines current students will benefit from it.

“It’s one of those things that you just have to know about,” he said. “Once you know about it, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t use it to check prices.”

Jordan Osterman can be reached at jrosterman@stthomas.edu.