Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
By Honora Quinn ʼ27
Staff Writer
For 15 days, the Mount Holyoke College community lost online access to Odyssey Bookshop, the bookstore closest to its campus and one of the few businesses located in the Village Commons. Mount Holyoke News’ staff has followed this situation closely, even as both the problem and its eventual resolution appeared to be hidden from view.
The problem was first addressed in early February attempts to reach the Odyssey Bookshop’s website online would result in an error message displaying that connecting to the site had taken too long and had now timed out. This could be caused by any number of issues, such as poor connection to the internet — the site crashing — or the Odyssey site being down for maintenance by the store. Eventually, Odyssey Bookshop addressed the connectivity issue.
On Feb. 10, the bookstore’s official Instagram account posted a blue and yellow graphic with the words “Mount Holyoke Students! ALERT! Our website is NOT down but cannot be reached using the EDUROAM Wi-Fi!”
This problem has since been rectified. Odyssey Bookshop made another post on Feb. 26: “Mount Holyoke Students! Peace is Restored! (You can reach our website from MHC wifi again!)”
Mount Holyoke News sat down with Bethany Powell, the self-described Mount Holyoke store coordinator, who is also in charge of marketing and social media for Odyssey Bookshop, on March 28 to learn what led to the blackout.
Powell first learned that something was wrong while tabling in Blanchard Hall to meet with students firsthand. “I had gone on to campus to promote something that [The Odyssey was] doing as a promotion for Valentine's Day and the students were telling me, ‘Oh, your website is down’ which I have not otherwise experienced. We do a lot of web orders here in the store. So, as far as I knew, everything was fine,” Powell said.
Initial signs pointed to on-campus WiFi as one part of the issue. However, Director of Public Affairs and Media Relations Christian Feuerstein confirmed that “The College doesn't block or filter any websites” in an email to Mount Holyoke News.
Eventually, Powell discovered that the complications were arising from neither the College, nor the bookstore, but rather the Odyssey Bookshop’s website provider.
“It was something more complicated between the two firewalls,” Powell said. “The IP addresses that were coming out of Mount Holyoke College had been assigned by our website provider as part of a range that was problematic so [they] were not letting Mount Holyoke IP addresses access our website, [because they saw the site as] potentially [doing] something malicious.”
Odyssey Bookshop being virtually cut off from the campus community might not seem like the end of the world; their brick-and-mortar store is still standing within a short walking distance from campus. However, according to the American Booksellers Association, 29.6% of reporting stores’ sales came from using the online stores for the various websites. In the same article, they state, “In the post-COVID world, the expectation was that once in-store shopping returned to normal, online sales would drop to pre-COVID levels. Remarkably, they have not.”
Powell echoed this sentiment about the website’s importance. “The assumption also that our website was down doesn't look good for us. It looks [unprofessional]. It kind of takes away a certain amount of credibility. In that moment, you [think], ‘Oh, their website is down, and it has been down for days,’ even though that wasn't the issue,” the coordinator said.
Now, all is well. Students and the community alike can once again peruse Odyssey’s list of upcoming events, check what books are in stock, and more through its website. And after two months, the Mount Holyoke community finally has concrete answers about what happened back in February.