Textbook links new to independent Mocha

Mocha, a popular alternative to Banner for class hunting since 2006, now displays on a given class' page the prices of its required textbooks at both the Brown Bookstore and Amazon.com and links to the respective Web sites.

The program, which was never officially supported by the University, has been moved outside of the Brown Computer Science Department to Siliconfections, a company created and run by the original founders of Mocha. The site is no longer hosted by the Computer Science Department at cs.brown.edu, but runs on its own server at a private URL, http://brown.mochacourses.com. However, the former address still redirects to the new one.

The founders - Adam Cath '07, David Hirshberg '08, Daniel Leventhal '07 and David Pacheco '07 - formed a partnership with Amazon.com to include online textbook links. This partnership necessitated the switch to a server outside of Brown because students are not allowed to use University property for commercial reasons, Pacheco said.

"(After graduating), we were looking for ways to keep Mocha running in a sustainable way," Pacheco said. "What occurred to us in the last year or so is using the Amazon program to make textbook links online."

Mocha earns a commission every time a textbook is purchased, and the earnings go toward developing and maintaining the site, he added.

The Web site is more popular than ever, with 9,500 different visitors and a total of 38,000 site visits since Tuesday, Pacheco said.

Diogo Alves '11 said the changes make the usually stressful shopping period easier, because he can compare textbook prices and shop for the best deal.

"I like it because I can quickly compare the prices of the bookstore and Amazon. With that, I can go to the bookstore and get my books and then order the books on Amazon and then return my books to the bookstore," he said.

The site managers are looking to continue improving the accuracy and timeliness by acquiring an official data-feed from Banner's course listings, Pacheco said. The four are also considering creating a site similar to Mocha for other universities in the future.