It's textbook season right now, with a veritable explosion of textbooks because of all the recent changes in Microsoft software.
(this is wedding related, I promise!)
Textbook publishers are evil. They charge the students outrageous amounts for a textbook, then deliberately make tiny superficial changes to the book every year or to so that the used volumes will be worthless and more students will be required to buy something new. They bombard faculty with textbooks that often have nothing remotely to do with what we teach, or even worse they completely ignore the list of criteria that you provide for what you'd like to review (Anything Linux after 2005, advanced Access and Vista classes only - no basic, and don't send me anything on other Office products was my request this year.) You should have seen the crap they sent me, not one book meeting those criteria.
If it's a book I can use, I will keep it, as an addition to my Linux reference library, or a book that we actually use to give a student who I know is working hard but barely able to survive financially. But the rest? Amazon.com, baby. I sell them as new (which they are), I don't sell books marked "Instructor version" as so many others do, I try to be thorough in my descriptions of dents and marks. And in a good season, as this one is looking to be, I'll easily make $500 or more.
I have received over a dozen in the past week, and have so far sold and shipped three, for a total profit of $135.
Now you'll see how this is wedding related.
That money is going into my personal saving account, to sit until the start of our holiday break, at which time I hope to go in for my first laser treatment for these damned capillaries all over my face. I think I'll have them zap this mustache while they're at it. The dr. said it would take several visits and I presume that there is some burning look to the face after a treatments, so I don't want to do it while I'd be in class. So I'll spread them out - one this winter break, one summer, then one again the next winter break. And the greedy overpaid textbook manufacturers will pay for it, though through them I'm earning my profit on the backs of the students' that they're ripping off. I think I'll just have to find a way for my conscience to deal with it.
The Mail Room Guy keeps saying that he'll start bringing me books from a stack delivered to faculty who are no longer there, for me to sell. What a haul that would be! I'll pull out any we use on campus to give to students who need them, and sell the rest. Hell, if the stack's big enough we could fund half the wedding.
Wasteful corporate bullshit funded vanity.
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3 comments:
I don't know how I feel about this whole textbook thing. I know that the prices are outrageous, but I also know that a business is a business and they can't afford to print books if they don't make a profit. And if students are handing down all their books, there's no profit, no publishers, and no new books when they're really needed.
Seems to me the real problem is that textbook publishers tend to be specialized, and seems to me the solution is simple: Set it up as a non-profit sector (and tax write-off) of a major publishing house. Of course, the problem with that is that major publishing houses aren't exactly rolling in the dough these days, either.
So then issue books on line or on DVD, with updates. If you're buying it for the first time, you get the updates incorporated. If have it already (because you failed it the first time, you're a professor, or you bought it from a friend), you can get the updates for just a couple bucks.
Ta da! Problem solved. Now, about this "global warming..."
(I know this wasn't exactly the point of your email, but I've been wanting to get it off my chest for a while and it just came out!)
I don't have any problem with a book publisher making a profit, and I like your idea about selling the updates. The two things that piss me off the most are that (a) half the time they put something out as a "new" edition when in fact the only changes are cosmetic, or they change the names of the files used in the exercises, or something inane like that, while real errors in the book or poor explanations or whatever go unchanged - the sole purpose of the new edition then is to make the old edition unsellable as a used book, and (b) they are so hideously wasteful when it comes to sending out review books - not only sending things that instructors didn't request, but going against what they do request and sending all kinds of other crap that they specifically said they can't use.
And, yeah, it's rather hypocritical for me to bitch about that and then turn around and make a tidy little profit of of it.
Yeah, the textbook thing always pissed me off, too.
On the laser stuff, don't bother with the hair removal: it takes about 6 treatments and even then, most will eventually grow back.
Most fair-haired people have some visible capillaries; my sister had several treatments with saline to get rid of the larger ones on/near her nose. I'm not familiar with how those are treated with the newer lasers, but laser treatment in general won't be noticeable to most people. It's merely a tiny bit of redness that goes away in a matter of hours, then peels several days later. (at least, for me).
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