Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Looking around the campus today I saw the College of Engineering Assembly’s humorous posters for their Buy Back Books program. It was two guys, one with his arm around the other’s shoulder, while both holding a book with the title “I Want to Love.” Not that I really think that’s one of the required readings any teacher would require of even the most specialized liberal arts course. But it does get the passerby noticing and the message across.

The Triple-B campaign has student groups purchasing textbooks students no longer use and selling them back to those who are taking the same subjects in the current term at a cheaper price than brand new copies.

I wish that program of the different student organizations had been around when I was a freshman some (cough) sixteen (cough) years ago. All the books I bought back then, except for calculus, statistics and programming are all stuck in the highest shelf (literally touching the ceiling) of my old room.

Considering how previous generations of book publishers have gotten around this hurdle of inheriting textbooks from older siblings and such by introducing new editions of existing publications every few years that are strictly used even though sometimes containing only minor changes, the antiques are now only valued for the sentimental border doodles, or the recycling heap.

A year or so ago, the university bookstore actually protested this practice as infringing on their business. I don’t know if it ever got to the point of a hearing with the administration being forced to issue a final edict after listening to the arguments from both sides, but I guess the practice would have thrived underground anyway if it was prevented.

At least now, the minimal profit the student groups are collecting are meticulously documented and have to be put to use on other projects instead of personal profit. And the bookstore, following the old adage, “if you can’t beat them, join them” has initiated their own.

Personally I have yet to teach a course where there is a required textbook. In all of my lecture classes, reference volumes are always optional for those who want to have supplementary reading.

The only exception, of course, are lab manuals, which all students who have to acquire them fill up all the data sheets in the course of the term and submit them to the teacher at the end of the term. A frustrating stumbling block for us with this constant demand is somehow the university press via the bookstore, could not keep up with the copy orders we give when they ask. To keep up in class, students are forced to rely on photocopying the experiment texts.

On the other hand, if there are any of those manuals left over in the campus stores at the end of the school year, they are charged to the department, despite eventually being sold out.

We walk a thin line not to get penalized one way or another.