Generation X entrepreneur John Chrastka has just launched the first academic sales and services website in Internet history. This innovative site dedicated to serving busy professors features new texts in emerging disciplines like Religions and Women s Studies and standard disciplines experiencing a renaissance such as Classics, Ethics and Philosophy. Until now, academic publishers relied solely on time consuming and costly ways such as road reps and catalogue mailings to get their new titles to faculty. To Chrastka, who began his career as a successful academic publishing road rep, these techniques no longer made any sense.
Faculty have more responsibilities and less time.
It costs publishers over 100K a year to keep a rep on the road, meeting with professors who ve come to view their visits as a necessary inconvenience. The Chicago son, reared on computers, knew there was a better way. Creating an online sales site featuring new titles from publishers would offer faculty a convenient way to survey and receive exam copies, saving time and money. I knew if we featured other services that also saved professors significant amounts of time and energy like the ability to design their course packets quickly and easily - a task that s normally an enormous hassle on or offline and costs the professor authors and publishers a half billion dollars in lost revenues yearly, ReviewCopy. Com would be a huge success.