BIGWORDS.com was a dot-com company created by Jeff Sherwood and Matt Johnson in 1998 that is often used to illustrate the stellar rise and spectacular fall of such companies. It was a site designed for college students in the days when college students were a disproportionately large percentage of Internet users. Johnson correctly noted that the whole domain of college textbooks was a very uneven and inefficient market. BIGWORDS.com took on the herculean task of consolidating and transforming the textbook market. After a nearly disastrous second semester, while shipping out of Chicago, BIGWORDS.com figured out the basics of the logistical problem of getting students their books quickly. The logistics of doing this were immense and included a distribution center in Hebron, KY staffed by some of the best people in the business, and a team of Russian mathematicians who did predictive analysis to help BIGWORDS.com buy the correct books despite the ill will of the college bookstores and the "you're doing what?" response of the textbook publishers. BIGWORDS.com also pioneered a Dell-like approach to inventory that allowed the storage on premises of large amounts of textbooks, in publisher owned bays, which could then be tranferred into BIGWORDS.com's inventory as needed.

Although BIGWORDS.com eventually failed the creativity, intelligence and enormous amount of real problems that the staff provided and surmounted should not be underestimated. BIGWORDS.com and their competitor VarsityBooks.com had a large impact on the College textbook market despite the fact that both of them eventually went out of business. Tom Green was once a spokesperson for the site and did commercials for them. Despite gathering some of the finest minds in the marketing, fulfillment, logistics, web development and other areas BIGWORDS.com filed for bankruptcy two years after its creation in October (2000).

BIGWORDS 2.0, the current incarnation of BIGWORDS.com is the brain-child of one of the Founders of the original BIGWORDS.com, Jeff Sherwood. Sherwood was one of the first people to work with the commercial Internet in Los Angeles in the early '90's and he was the developer for early web hits like the The Spot, a very popular "webisodic."
Sherwood bought the URL BIGWORDS.com from the bankruptcy court on the open market and formed BIGGERWORDS, Inc., the current owner of BIGWORDS.com.

BIGWORDS.com is now a price search engine for textbooks, DVDs, Music and Supplies. As well, students can sell their books back using BIGWORDS.com's search engine technology. True to Johnson's original vision of empowering students BIGWORDS.com democratizes access to buying and selling back textbooks. By offering students access to a national (as opposed to painfully local) market BIGWORDS.com levels out what is often very uneven pricing throughout different local markets in the United States. Demonstrating Sherwood's Internet genius BIGWORDS.com is a highly effective, and very well thought out serach engine. Students can put in a large list of books and the BIGWORDS.com "Uber-BOT" will try combinations, taking into account the cost of shipping, as well as various coupons available and compute the absolute lowest cost way to buy any combination of books. This is an invaluable time saver for students who often have far more than one book to buy per semester.

== External links ==

BIGWORDS.com

Textbook Cases of Bankruptcy — provided by Wired

The Textbook Case — provided by Wired

The BigWords story — provided by Wired

BigWords story from the inside — provided by TechTransform