Gettin' Hit By The Books

It's the first full week of the new term and already we're hitting the books hard.  It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't feel like my books were trying to hit me back.  How is it that in this era of modern technology and crowd-sourcing textbooks are still so terrible and ridiculously expensive?  

Last term I didn't take the time to fully calculate the damage but I did come home after an incomplete round at the bookstore to announce to my partner that this was what $500 looked like:

That English Grammar book by Anita Barry on the left was $187 alone - seriously.

I didn't mind buying textbooks during my first degree.  I was young and naive and having heavy books to cart around was like proof that I was learning something big and important.  I was a delusional fool who bought all new texts and didn't want to sell them at the end of term because they were the physical evidence that I was earning my big bad education.

This time around I've got a much better dose of bitter indignation about the whole affair.  Not only are books more expensive than 5 years ago, the internet makes them seem completely useless and unnecessary.  The $187 grammar book?  I opened it twice all term.  The professor admitted that it was a terrible book half-way through the term and gave us the website of another university to study from instead!

This term, I've tried to wise up and buy as many books from my fellow students as possible but it's been impossible to ignore what seems like extortion occurring at the campus bookstore.  The total cost of all of my books for this term if I'd bought them new from the bookstore would have been over $700.  Even if I'd managed to get used copies at the bookstore for every text the total would have been over $500.  In the end I managed to get a couple of books from other students but I'm still sitting pretty close to $500 because of a couple of books that seem completely outrageous.

The best part is that there seems to be an inverse relationship between the usefulness of a text and its cost.  I can already see that my most expensive text is a real dud even though the professor for the class is doing us the favour of teaching directly from it (good thing he's got that PhD!).  I'm particularly looking forward to reading about how to make an effective powerpoint presentation (WTF!).

As a student, it's pretty hard to get around this stuff.  A classmate of mine buys all her books on Amazon but that doesn't leave much room for last minute schedule changes or that one prof who decides to change the text at the last minute.  Most of us just bend over and take it and the publishers obviously know it.  Part of me wants to start a rebellion and scan all of my books to the internet.  Another part of me wants to slap all of my professors and ask them how they have so easily become willing co-conspirators in all of this.  

But I guess there is a lesson to be learned in all of it.  As much as I am enjoying my return to academia and all of the warm fuzzies that come with the immersion in a learning environment, it's painfully obvious that university education is now big business.  I'm a cow at a degree farm.  Hear me moo.