Cramster

» see cramster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

cramster sold worked solutions to american college textbooks by subscription, from 2003 to 2012. i was an engineering undergraduate for most of that window, in ankara, and a good share of the books were the same american ones in local printings. the product was aimed squarely at what i was doing and it was never going to reach me, because the thing it was selling already existed here in a cheaper form.

the solution economy at a turkish faculty ran on paper. somebody a year above you had a copy and so did the photocopy shop across from the campus gate, and it moved hand to hand at the price of the photocopying. that system was slower than cramster and nobody had cataloged any of it. it also cost close to nothing, which meant a subscription site with a login had nothing to offer against it.

aaron hawkey and robert angarita started the company in pasadena in 2002 with kave golabi, and it opened to the public in 2003. by november 2008 it was reporting a hundred thousand active users, with a facebook application called courses 2.0 that had passed four hundred thousand on its own. three million dollars of series a arrived that year and six million more in 2010.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually sold ~

american textbooks print answers to the odd-numbered problems in the back, and the even ones are what gets assigned. that gap is the entire business. cramster's own front page advertised more than a million odd and even textbook solutions, worked through in steps rather than given as a final number, keyed to specific editions of specific books.

the second half was a question board. you posted a problem and an expert answered it, with the site promising a turnaround inside two hours. by 2012 it was claiming more than two hundred experts waiting. the experts were not staff. they were people answering for points that converted into rewards, which is the same unpaid-labor arrangement that ran most of the useful internet in that decade.

~ the honor code ~

signing up meant agreeing to two documents, the terms of use and something the company called the cramster honor code. it is a strange artifact. a business whose entire product is the answer to the homework needed a written position on whether using it was cheating, and the honor code was that position.

the defense was that a worked solution you read after attempting the problem is a tutor, while the same solution copied at midnight is not. only the student ever knows which one is happening. that was true and it was also unenforceable, and everybody involved understood the arrangement. what actually protected cramster was that professors could not do much about it, since the same solution manuals had been circulating on paper for decades. the site made the circulation searchable and put a price on it.

~ the migration ~

chegg announced the acquisition on 8 december 2010. price undisclosed. chegg at that point was a textbook rental company with a warehouse problem, and cramster was the digital thing it wanted, since a homework subscription has no shipping cost and no returns window.

the brand did not die that day. cramster.com kept serving its own homepage under its own name for sixteen more months, with a chegg-integration flag quietly sitting in the page markup. archive captures put the switch in the third week of april 2012: a full cramster homepage on the 18th, and by the 22nd a stripped page saying the homework help services have moved to chegg, with every button on it a redirect. by 2013 the page was a farewell letter signed by the chegg team, and by that summer the whole domain was a three-hundred-byte stub.

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