486G!

Today I realized something extraordinary. As I relaxed during a lazy morning, I decided to take a look around my room. The first thing I glanced at was my iPod, the second, my German textbook laying spread eagle upon my desk. This is when I stopped looking

It struck me at that exact moment, that I had actually paid more for my German textbook than I had for my iPod. I thought, how can this marvelous wonder of technology be out-priced by one over 500 years old? I begun to look around the room. Printer-$80, cheaper. Microwave-$120, cheaper. Paint ball gun-$150, cheaper.  Electric shaver- $160, cheaper. I was hit with an odd realization that the only things more expensive than a simple textbook in my room were my skis, my iPhone, and the laptop I currently type upon.

So this is where all my money has really gone this year, not beverages, or food. Not even concert tickets. My single greatest expense lies idly on a shelf for the greater part of its lifetime.

Getting down to the basics, we can more or less assume textbooks are absolutely worthless. First of all, they have a useful life expectancy equal to the length of time you spent in that certain class, or in other words 4-8 months. Secondly, they are full of errors, hard to read, out of date, impossible to understand, and don’t offer any profound insights. Thirdly, you can never buy used ones because publishers produce new editions every other year! It’s an insulting spit into every university students’ face when a publisher releases a new edition, and the student can’t use it because the order of 2 chapters were switched.

Despite fierce competition, this is perhaps the easiest industry in existence to make money: limitless demand, little to no labour, volume of sales very easy to predict, essentially no capital required, less an industrial printer. This industry is even relatively recession proof. In other words a lazy and greedy conglomeration of so called academic authors and eager publishers.

In my research on this topic, I came across another blog which mentioned marketer and author Seth Godin’s opinion on the text book industry. I can’t agree more with him saying  “[The textbook] industry deserves to die.”

Further in my research, I came across a post mentioning a new site I have never heard of before. www.flatworldknowledge.com.  This site provides electronic copies of textbooks to teachers and students alike, and is formatted under an open source system where teachers can edit the book as they like.

I can imagine this being very popular in the near future, all it needs is a little word of mouth, a larger variety of books, and time to knock down the textbook industry.

This site is my new go to spot every semester. I’ve got $1300 worth of textbooks laying on my shelf, yet I lock up my $900 laptop. This twisted fact needs to be changed.

Here is the blog I mentioned earlier: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2009/06/seth-on-why-the-textbook-industry-deserves-to-die.html

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