Parents spend more than €7 million a year on school books. Now a website that offers second-hand copies could help to ease the financial pain, writes Fergal Quinn.

It's a familiar sight to parents with children at school. Piles and piles of dusty school books, dog-eared and cast aside after a year's heavy-duty use. Most are loath to throw them out. Some hang on to them for a few years, in the hope that a younger member of the family might use them. For the most part, though, they simply lie there, taking up that space at the back of the attic or under the stairs where nobody dare go.

It is estimated that parents and students spend about €7.5 million a year buying new school books or replacing old ones. Up to 500,000 primary, secondary and college books are dumped or not reused each year.

Before now, there were few ways to reduce the financial and environmental waste involved in buying college and school books each year. But for Tim Hurley, a Waterford man living in Dublin with three young, school-going children, necessity was the mother of invention. The idea for www.schoolbook exchange.ie, his new Web-based service, arose from his bitter experience of spending hundreds of euro, year after year, to keep his children in new school books.

"I was convinced that there simply had to be a more efficient and cost-effective way of supplying students with the books they needed," he says.

While all of these used school and college books sit in homes gathering dust, thousands of parents and students are looking for the same books. "What was needed was a place where sellers and buyers of second-hand books all over Ireland could exchange their books. This is one area where the Internet has really made a solution possible."

Hurley registered www.schoolbook exchange.ie as a web address three years ago. But it has taken until now to get the website functioning fully and efficiently.

The service, which is free, is designed to be as simple as possible. You log on to the site, then enter the details of your used school books - from primary level right up to college or adult education - which you can sell or swap, as you

wish.

Then, as people come to the site looking for second-hand books, you wait for them to get in touch after using the

site's search facility to call up a

list of everybody with the books they need.

Instead of handling the books itself, Hurley's service puts buyers, sellers and swappers in touch with each other. They can meet to exchange the books or do it by post.

This website is also of benefit to schools and education organisations. Wicklow County Council, for example, contacted the site after finding that it had thousands of used school books sitting in skips.

Hurley set up a system so they could enter the books' details onto a spreadsheet, then transfer them to the website, making a large volume of books easily and quickly available for sale.

The website has received more than 20,000 hits so far. "Thousands of books have been registered for sale, and many are already sold, but I believe this truly is just the tip of the iceberg," says Hurley. "This website has the potential to benefit tens of thousands of families and schools and organisations all over Ireland."

For now, though, Hurley's immediate need is to encourage parents and students to put the details of their unneeded books on the website. "I want to make www.schoolbookexchange.ie as much a part of the back-to-school routine as buying the uniform or new school bag. Using the website will save money on the cost of school books and help protect our environment."