Professors, Please Read!

I am developing something for the English department at my school (it could be used by other departments, but I am working with my department chair on this right now). I am curious what you folks out there in the blogosphere think of my idea, keeping in mind that I work at a community college, where such a plan as I will lay out below may have more value than at a university.

I am putting together a textbook review system that will allow instructors—at least those with new preps or changing texts—to see what other people think of the texts out there. Since every course has a course outline that spells out what the goals and requirements are, the textbooks we use should support us in helping the students meet the goals for a given course, but it is not easy to skim, much less read, every viable book on the market. This is where my idea comes in.

An administrator (the Department Chair or designee) assigns a text-course combination to a reviewer, who grades (using a 4-point system, just like letter grades) how well the textbook meets each of the requirements for the course. An end user can then look up a course and see all of the textbooks that have been reviewed, what their overall scores are, and what their individual scores are.

From a technological standpoint, this is easy. I had a false start late last night, and today I have gone from scratch to almost full functionality. The cost is minimal ($299, without educational discount, for the software if we only need to support up to five web users at a time), and the security is solid. Here's the question:

Would you find any value in something of this nature?