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Nasir and Matt discuss the company in danger of being sued for having a Chrome plugin that allows students to compare prices of college textbooks from all sources. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our podcast where we cover business legal news and my name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: This is our second episode for our new format where you can also send in your ideas and some questions to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. MATT: That is correct. NASIR: That is correctamundo. MATT: Our theme this week – well, it wasn’t intentional, I don’t think, maybe it was – basically, things that are created to make consumers’ lives cheaper and then bigger companies getting upset and then coming after the people that created the ideas. NASIR: It’s a pretty common theme. I think people have covered it many times before. MATT: Yeah, it’s a common thing. NASIR: Very specific, but… MATT: Yeah, on Monday, we talked about the guy who started the site that will basically get you cheaper flights. Today, we’re going to talk about – it’s not even a site – it’s a… NASIR: Chrome extension. MATT: An extension, yes. An extension on Chrome that you can download that will basically get you cheaper textbooks and I know that, the last couple of years, it’s been a really huge deal with, like, the price of textbooks. I mean, even when we were in school, I know it was outrageously expensive to buy books, especially if you’re going to use it for… I mean, did you ever do the thing where you would buy a book, like, a new book, and then you would go return it to the bookstore at the end of the year and just sell it back and it was two percent of what you bought it for? NASIR: Oh, yeah, it was ridiculous. I think the first year, I just lost, it was like half the tuition I was paying, basically. It was crazy how much I spent on books. And then, you realize, of course, the professors don’t even use all the books or what-have-you, or the book itself is written by the professor. MATT: That’s the worst. NASIR: Yeah, you know. But then, I think it was, like, towards the second or third year, I think by this time they already had these book comparison sites. I think I used, I think it was AbeBooks. On our campus too, there was a couple of bookstores. There was one on campus but then also off-campus that basically it was called KB Books for all you San Diegan natives there. And they sold basically all the same textbooks with a little bit of a cheaper price. It was still pretty expensive but at least it was an alternative so it kept the prices a little competitive. MATT: There are all these sites out there that do comparison tools. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: Especially now with the ebooks being more prevalent that those popped up. I can never get into those just because I like to read on actual paper. Anyways, before I get too off-track with my history, like I said, there’s all these different sites that do price comparison tools for textbooks. There’s a whole bunch of them, way more than I realized, but these people, these two guys created this extension for Chrome called Occupy the Bookstore. So, you can download it, let’s say you’re searching for a book, you hit the book and this thing will pop up and run a search of every book and then, if you were on the university’s website and you’re like, “Oh, I can actually get this book for much cheaper,” it’ll direct you to that. So, you can see why some of these places are pretty upset. I think the biggest site, Follett? NASIR: Yeah, I think they’re a publisher. Well, okay, they service college bookstores. So, they’re either a publisher or some kind of distributor company or whatever. I’m sure they represent many different authors or publishing companies, I would assume. They’re apparently a $2.7 billion company according to this Chrome extension developer. MATT: Yeah. So, just like on Monday, we had some tortious interference with contract.