Levy says the company's low overhead--it has just 25 employees, one office and one warehouse--allows it to offer drastic discounts.

According to Levy, Harvard students responded well to the site this year, and so may soon see their school on that pulldown list.

Harvard.com

But Square bookstores are fighting the on-line onslaught.

"We are currently developing a way to have a textbook presence on-line, shooting for this fall," Powell says of the Coop.

And most of the Square's smaller stores have been reaping the rewards of on-line sales for several years.

Davis says about 70 percent of Schoenhof's sales are sent through the mail, and on-line orders comprise most of this.

Because of its foreign book selection, Schoenhof's actually serves as a supplier for many large chains--including Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

"Most of our competitors specialize in one language," says Dan Cianfarini, marketing director at Schoenhof's.

Burkin estimates that WordsWorth does about 12 percent of its total business through its Web site, which offers the complete list of titles available in the store.

Gomez.com, a Web site that rates on-line booksellers, ranks WordsWorth's site first in "customer confidence."

Burkin says her store's site is head and shoulders above Amazon's because of its hand-picked list of titles and that old standby of personalized customer service.

"We still deal with customers by their names on-line," she says. "We don't ask them, 'What's your password?'"

Horne estimates that the Harvard Book Store offers between 500,000 and 750,000 titles on-line through Booksite.com, an umbrella site that helps independent booksellers introduce Internet sales into their business schemes.

Horne estimates that the store currently conducts only one percent of its total business on-line, but says she expects that to grow.