Joe Lammers has launched a new website for college students who want to buy or sell textbooks without some of the potential hazards of the exchange.

The collegemiddle.com site is a place where students and other people on campus can buy and sell and “feel safe,” said Lammers, a Wright State University and University of Dayton alumnus.

‘“It’s different because our model avoids the need for buyer and seller to arrange meetings, meet in strange places, and carry cash to the meeting. This is usually when things go wrong,” Lammers said.

“With other websites, it’s dangerous. You’re carrying cash to the meeting. You don’t know where you’re meeting. The student might not make great choices about where to meet. What we’re trying to do is make it safe,” he said.

Lammers said through his site, a buyer picks from an established list of public places to meet the seller. Sellers list the books for free and money is exchanged through the site using credit cards or Paypal for about a 5 percent fee for processing the money. The site is open to everyone, but Wright State is currently a target school for the site, which Lammers has been developing for about four months.

“No one pays anything unless you buy something,” he said.

Although Lammers said he created the site out of his frustration about the expense of books during his undergraduate career at Wright State and as he earned an MBA from University of Dayton, he hopes to eventually expand the site with ideas from students and plans to include a tutoring function soon.

For now, he said students can register what book they want to buy to receive a notice of when someone begins selling that item. And students can list what books they will sell at the end of the semester.

Frustration over the price of textbooks also inspired another group of local students and graduates to lauch a classifieds website, hellopostify.com, that requires sellers to have an educational email address — a .edu.

The average university student spends $1,168 annually on classroom materials, according to the College Board.