Textbooks

First day of class means that I actually have to go through the sheer, unadulterated pleasure that is buying textbooks. The lottery may be a tax on stupid people, but textbooks are a tax on smart people. Or people stupid enough to buy their books from the University bookstore.

Per ounce, textbooks cost as much as cocaine or plutonium. The problem is, for a 130 dollar book, college textbooks sure don't look like one. I mean for that kind of money, I want to see leather binding. I want to see gold leaf on the edges. I want this book to feel like an illuminated manuscript where teams of monks have been slaving away at it for years. The head monk cracking a whip shouting about how if they don't work faster, a comparative feminism class will have to use photocopies of the last edition.[1]

I like to believe that the reason these textbooks cost so much is so that you force yourself to read them. For that kind of money, you don't want to think that the only reason you bought the book was to keep the beer cans from leaving rings on your coffee table.

And in 13 weeks time, I get to experience selling textbooks back. If you do the math, after about 20 weeks, textbooks are actually worth zero dollars. Blame that little thing called The New Edition. For things like the hard sciences where all kinds of discoveries are made all the time, having a new edition come out every other year makes sense. For the more fakesocial sciences, a new edition is a little harder to understand. Yes, the new edition of Comparative Narrative Studies costs more, but it's got 20% more criticism, twice the moral relativism and 50% less patriarchy!And 50% more incomprehensibility. For this edition, we've actually made up no less than seven critical terms.[2]


[1]Textbookmaking indentured servitude seems like an appropriate punishment for certain priests.
[2]Textbooks are, in that regard much like A Clockwork Orange. By the end, you can usually identify what the words mean based on context, but that still doesn't give a reason why the text was written to be so obtusely in the first place.