In Defense of Physical Textbooks (Even if They Make Me Eat Cup Noodles While I Weep at My Depleted Wallet)

Tags

college, textbooks

Today, let’s talk about other stuff I read: textbooks! I hate them.

They are ridiculously heavy. My mom jokingly attributes my short height to the six-hundred paged textbook I had to carry daily in second grade (she also attributes my shortness to not drinking enough milk.) I prefer to think of it as body-building. They are also expensive, because publishers know you NEED them–so you don’t have a choice but to fork over the money. Many textbooks now also come with their own unique access codes for their online content, which makes it difficult to re-sell a used copy.

You might consider an alternative: e-textbooks! They are cheaper and are better for the environment–what a wonderful invention! Well, not really. I’m a graphic design major, which requires me to be glued to the computer at least ten hours a day (not including research and essay writing time.) The last thing I want to do is stare at another screen. I rather pay extra to give my eyes a rest.

And e-textbooks aren’t REALLY that cheap because you can’t re-sell them (legally.) From past experience, buying the e-textbook meant I would have to read the textbook at the publisher’s website by buying an access code. The access code will only last about one semester, so you won’t be able to refer to the textbook after a certain date. I understand the reluctance to allow downloading for fear of illegal mass-distribution, but it means I need to be connected to the Internet to read the textbook. This also means that if my Internet connection happened to be horrible, each page would take at least five minutes to “turn.” And it’s just plain unreliable, as the website might go down right before your exam (it happened, and it definitely wasn’t pretty.)

This article is written for US Bundle’s 2013 College Scholarship contest because being a college student is expensive. *keeps eating cup noodles*

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Stuff I Do When I’m Not Reading: Alternate Covers

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covers, graphic design, halloween, horror

If you didn’t know (you don’t, stop lying,) I am a graphic design major. And sometimes (many times) drawing letterforms and designing bus schedules (if I see another row of times again…) makes me want to flip a table and be a bum instead. A few months ago, because I was tried of tracing letterforms, I entered a re-cover contest over at TotalBookaholic for their Haunted Halloween event. I forgot about it until I was contacted today as a third place winner. Then I thought I might as well share them, because it is kinda book related:

My favorite is the red Warm Bodies cover–but I ultimately didn’t submit that one because someone said the blue one was scarier and because I thought everyone else’s entry would be red…they were mostly blue. So much for that plan.

The Holiday Season is Here, Which Means Another Annual Re-reading of…

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christmas, holiday

WINTER BREAK IS HERE! (actually, I have my Chinese final next week, but I can probably ace that with my eyes closed) Now I am going to lock myself in and READ. Three whole weeks of freedom before I go back to 8:30 to 6:15 classes and survive off caffeine, whoo hoo!

I see many readers are stocking their December TBR with a lot of Christmas-y books. But I am not a very Christmas person (see how hipster I’m being?) Instead, I will re-read a Christmas-y article that never fails to make me laugh: David Sedaris’s Six to Eight Black Men (OR Listen to Sedaris read it on YouTube.)

Read it. It’s super short and it’s hilarious (and not the kind of “hilarious” that’s written in book blurbs, but NEVER turns out to be true.) Even Christina over at A Reader of Fictions agrees. We have good taste.

And because Esquire took it off their website and every other version I found on the web looks badly formatted (and is missing words,) I’ll just copy and paste it below. Way Back Machine to the rescue!

This Week, NPR Left Me Ambivalent (damn, I like that word.)

Tags

book news, npr

First off, NPR made me happy by reporting that THERE IS A BOOK VENDING MACHINE. Biblio-Mat, The Monkey’s Paw’s book vending machine, will dispense you a random (albeit used) book for $2. It’s almost as wonderful as The Book Cemetery from the Shadow of the Wind. And it looks so classy. I love it. Now I need a plane ticket to Toronto. Lucky Canadians.

Then NPR made me sad when I found out that they interview pretentious douchebags like Joe Queenan. I thought I would like the guy since he is a hardcore bibliophile with over six thousand books under his belt and on top of that, also written nine. But everything that comes out of his mouth in his NPR interview makes me want to send the Internet after him. Or maybe I’ll just bitch-slap him. He says things like:

Libraries kind of depress me…a lot of it is because libraries used to have some kind of way of putting the kind of Graham Greene and Charles Dickens and Jane Austen stuff in one category, and then they’d have like Daphne Du Maurier and people — but they wouldn’t have the actual trash mixed in. And now it’s all just one big maul and it’s kind of depressing because most of the books you see in the library shelves are terrible books.

Then he proceeds to hate on bookstores because he thinks they judge him. (I don’t bookstore he’s visiting.) And book clubs too, because they don’t read his favorite books. Self-publishing isn’t safe against his wrath either:

Self-published books are great. Self-published books are so, so addled. … They always have ghosts. Like the ghost of a deer goes into a composer’s head and becomes a serial killer, and there’s no editor to say, ‘You really want to tone this down.’ … They’re just insanely bad books. … I read them, but I read them real fast.

I need to seriously reconsider my belief that reading makes people open-minded.
On the other hand, I approve of Book Riot’s gif-filled response.

I Often Chat With Strangers, and Sometimes They Scare Me

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chat, existence, humanity, humor, omegle, strangers, stupidity, world

I like Omegle. It’s a site where random strangers are paired up with one another to have a chat. If I am lucky enough to shift through the pedophiles, and 14-year olds looking for a sexchat, I sometimes have enlightening discussions about philosophy, the meaning of life, and how to survive a zombie apocalypse. And then sometimes I get this:

I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

I Am Sorry, Newspaper Telemarketer

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advertisinf, article, dead babies, dead bodies, hiding a dead body, humor, jokes, magazine, newspaper, subscribe, subscription, telemarketer

The sad moment when you realize that coupons are probably the only thing keeping newspaper subscribers.

I hate subscribing to anything. Even newspapers. Every few months I get a call from a newspaper telemarketer which ends up sounding a little like this:

Telemarketer: Hi, this is X from the (insert local newspaper here), would you like to subscribe for only (insert some cheap dollar amount here) a year?
Me: I’m sorry but I’m not interested.
Telemarketer: How about only the Sunday paper? You can get that for only (some other super cheap amount) a year!
Me: Well, we’ve actually subscribed before, but we barely had time to read the newspaper, and recycling it became a hassle. Besides, we watch the news on TV, or read the news online.
Telemarketer: But the online version is abridged, you get more out of the print version! Are you interested in coupons? There are a lot of coupons in the Sunday paper…
At this point I feel sorry for the telemarketer who I shot down–and also disappointed that he is resorting to trying to sell me coupons for a dollar off Tide detergent instead of the beauty of the written word. But I don’t even read newspapers, and why would I when I have television to feed me the news? My RSS feed updates every fifteen minutes to give me the latest updates from The New York Times, CNN, Rutgers, and when I was taking Macroeconomics–The Economist. And often even before my RSS feed can give me the news…Twitter already told me. To be honest, being extremely informed of the news isn’t that awesome either. When I first subscribed to all the popular news websites in my effort to become an aware citizen, I didn’t know much more about my country, but I did know where to hide a body if I ever needed to (apparently there’s this lady who put her dead baby in some abandoned suitcase for several decades–which really only sounds cool in a mystery novel.)

I wish you had more coupons.

The only magazine I am currently subscribed to is Better Homes and Gardens–and that was only because I won a year subscription during some online sweepstakes. I don’t even read them, I only keep several copies for future collaging material (I am a Visual Arts major after all)…or maybe if I ever need to cut out letters for a blackmail letter.