Why Used Textbooks?
Price
As
the price of college has soared, students are trying to find ways to cut costs.
The price has jumped from $9,030* per year in the 1987-1988 school year to
$20,770 per year in the 2017-2018 school year (1). Therefore, anyone who thinks
college is affordable without getting into debt the size of a mortgage is
delirious. As such, students are pinching pennies in whatever way they can. One
of the ways to do this is use used-textbooks. Shortly after I schedule my
courses, I look up the textbook list online and start comparing prices at all
the different websites. Besides the bookstore downtown and the campus
bookstore, I check Rentbooks.com** and Chegg, as well as do a Google search for
both the ISBN number and then a different one for the title. I get different
results, but most of the time the four I just mentioned are where I find the
cheapest books. Also another trick I have found is to look up the books on the
college library website. Depending on the book and how long I’ll be using it, I
can sometimes borrow it from the campus library and not have to pay anything,
but this doesn’t work in all cases.
On
the other hand, my boyfriend always buys his textbooks, because as he is a physics and math major, he reuses his textbooks in other classes. Plus, he
likes to read the sections they don’t go over in class for fun. Meanwhile,
buying a specific translation of the Iliad
seems silly to me, because while I want to have it in my home library eventually, I don’t need to buy the $50 specific translation that this
professor really likes. Renting it for $10 sounds much nicer.
You Can Write in Them
Besides
the obvious benefit of saving money, there are also some other advantages to
using used-textbooks. First off, most places I have rented-from allow you to
write and highlight in the books as long as you don’t obscure the actual words
of the book. Because of this, the books I buy often have important parts
highlighted or notes made by the previous owner in the margins. While the previous
owners are fallible and could be wrong, I take what they write with a grain of
salt. However, reading their notes, seeing their thought process, and finding a
surprise cat sticky note stuck in between the pages of my used Norton Western
Literature Anthology.
Hank
Green, of Vlogbrothers, recently made a YouTube video where he explains that
after a joke video request by one of his earlier viewers he now pays close
attention to the sidewalks in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. Through
sidewalks, he feels connected to other humans that came before him. Even though
he might never meet them and they will probably never think of him, he says, “Like
I don’t have context for that person’s life, but what I do have is knowledge
that they were there …This tiny insignificant little human thing …I like that
this inanimate chunk of concrete connects people who don’t know that they are
connected.” (2)
You can Connect with Other Humans
So
here are some details of random strangers that make me smile, while I am bogged
down in homework. Everyone’s handwriting looks different and therefore,
everyone’s note taking is different. For example the person who left notes in
my Norton Western Literature Anthology in the Aeneid draws large light penciled in brackets around paragraphs
that they find important. The corners are rounded and the line becomes darker
and thicker as it moves away from the spine of the book. At one point where the
lines of the bracket didn’t fully connect to make a corner they made an extra
little pencil mark to connect them. Other books have had previous owners that
adored all things color, yellow, green, blue, and pink highlighters scattered
different pages, with purple rounded ink-drawn letters in the pages of my
teaching English Language Learners textbooks.
Last
spring, as I was struggling through Moby Dick, a tough book by itself made even
tougher by the confusing professor I had, I enjoyed the evidence of multiple
different students on the worn pages. I borrowed that book from the library and
it was pretty old, as the pages had turned a light brown. Over the years, many
students had used this book as pencil, and pen scrawls were strewn across every
page. I could also always count on a small lettered green colored pencil
summary at the end of most chapters, which made me realize I hadn’t understood
at least a quarter of what I read, but at least they showed me what I missed.
Flipping
aimlessly through the Norton, I can see that the bracket writer also had to
read Gwain and the Green Knight,
which was one of my favorite books in my eleventh grade year of highschool. I
tend to think the bracket writer came after the pink and yellow highlighter, as
the highlighter doesn’t smear the pencil around. The highlighter also seems to
be focusing on the lady, Bertilak’s wife, interacting with the green knight as
those lines are consistently illuminated throughout the Arthurian story. The
highlighter also read a play named Everyman,
where a different pencil note maker uses less than and greater than signs to
encapsulate the lines in the opening side and point their note with the other.
They also dot their I’s with little circles.
I
could have sworn I put this quote in one of my posts before, but I just checked
and I can’t find it anywhere.*** But here it is again. In her book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer
Within, Natalie Goldberg says, “We were here; we are human beings; this is
how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are
important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t
matter.” Despite the occasional feeling that our lives have no impact on the
world, in small ways at least they do. So the next time you need to get a text book, try a used one and maybe leave a note on the text, or even just a bracket.
Notes:
*These are 2017
dollars and for a public 4-year college
**I don’t get
paid to mention anything that I mention.
*** Let me know
if you remember in the comments (or if I’m just crazy)!
Sources: (accessed 2-18-18)
Image Credit: "Books (74/365)" By John Liu
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