Book Selling Reminder

Don’t sell your books! That would throw away the objective component of your education. You can use them for reference in future classes, or in life in general. Besides, the deal you get is so terrible, its just not worth it. And if you think that you will never need your books again because they come from classes you hated, and will never use, then you shouldn’t be in college.

Your education is not meant to be disposable. Don’t indicate that you think it is by selling your books.

Last semester, Travis, you threw away your intellectual integrity for cents on the dollar. What did you buy with that money? A hamburger? Capitalism bought and ate your soul.

I’ve got like ten from Urban Sociology if you want any, Max.

I also use money to pay for my privately owned health care.

Books, like umbrellas, hats, scabies, and the running waters of the Cripple Creek, are not truly owned by anyone and exchange hands as freely and quickly as the lice on the dustjacket of my first novella. It’s not a matter of disposability or education, or such 10-doll-hair words. The illusion of material ownership is THE psychological driving force behind capitalism anyway, not money or hamburgers. You can learn a lot from a hamburger. Remember Max, everything is poison, nothing is poison. Books, hamburgers, scabies.

No, you’re wrong. the illusion of capitalism is not material ownership, it is the illusion of the good life predicated on the contents of that ownership. It is an idea, an idea that only creeps into our minds once all other ideas have died. Books are the repository of those other ideas. Exchanging books is wonderful, and I think the health of a community can probably be measured on the health of its used book stores. But the speed at which books are recycled indicates by itself nothing. We must not treat ideas like cheap consumables, emptied out with monday’s trash. The things we study should be the things we love. Hence the ideas pertaining to this study should be retained. It is an ill omen indeed if they are not.

Color me nonplussed by your argument, Max. You extoll the virtues of “exchanging books”–going so far, even, as to say that “the health of a community can probably be measured on the health of its used book stores.” Then, you equate the buying back of textbooks with “treat[ing] ideas like cheap consumables, empited out with Monday’s trash.”

How, pray tell, are used book stores to come upon fresh fodder for those invaluable exchanges upon which we can gauge the health of our community? Do used books grow on trees? (Ignore here the bellows of the peanut gallery, as they belabor the point that all books, as paper products, technically “grow on trees.”) No, they come from other exchanges: people giving up books they once owned, either as a donation or a sale. Are used book stores, then, complicit in the great intellectual “crime” of buying back books?

You wrote earlier that “you shouldn’t be in college” if you can part with your textbooks. If that is your view of education–a view that is incapable of separating the content of books (and the knowledge gleaned from reading them) with the physical presence of books, and cannot conceive of a person able to hold the knowledge of a book once read without still owning that book–I would venture to claim that YOU “shouldn’t be in college.” Or at least, your Professors have failed to impart upon you the most important lesson of all. Being well-read is not enough; one must understand well what one reads.

The problem is not the buying back of books, per se. It is the mental ease with which students are willing to part with those books, having failed to milk at least a few drops of intellectual stimulation from them. I have no problem with a student selling back a book which they read carefully and from which they learned much. And, given the number of classes we are forced by University policy to attend (as opposed to those classes which we take for personal edification), I see nothing wrong with throwing those textbooks back into the market. At least there they might be of benefit to another, more curious soul seeking the enlightenment they hold.

In short, chill out.

Oh, and don’t sell back your textbooks here at school. Do it online where you won’t get ripped off as much.

You seem to have entirely missed the thrust of my last post, claiming to find a contradiction where there is none. From there you build up a position similar to the one I have already espoused. So the purpose of continuing to discuss this might be diminished. I continue because I am bored and want to “win” the argument by reclaiming conceptual territory you have attempted to appropriate from me. As a point of procedure I must protest that you refused to give my last post a charitable reading, and most certainly commit the straw-man fallacy.

As my last sentance of the previous post indicated, I see the perennial tossing away of classroom material as an ill omen. It is a signpost of an unhealthy attitutude towards education and life.

I clearly pointed out in my last post that the exchange of books is not a bad thing. But then I seemed opposed to the exchange represented by selling textbooks. An obvious contradiction? No, perhaps it is a point about how the selling of textbooks is a wholly different endeavor than the exchange of the used bookstore. Perhaps my point is that only a certain type of exchange is bad, the type of exchange represented by selling textbooks at the end of the semester. The reason this sort of exchange is bad, as I attempted to point out, is that it is indicative of a mentality that does not feel like classes that have been taken are useful in the long term. It is a mentality that sees education as disposable, perhaps useful only for the grade. We are in college. There is no way we have milked all possible drops of intellectual stimulation from our textbooks. We have not had time to peruse them leisurely. We have, on the contrary, rushed through them 10 at a time. Even if they are the books of classes that appeared uninteresting or unessential to one’s major, it makes more sense to hold on to them for a few years. Who knows when recalling a certain statistical model will come in handy, or a line of Chaucer? There is ample time to dispose of unread books down the line, in a leisurely fashion at the local used bookstore.

This is not even to mention the pittance received for each book. I agree, don’t sell your textbooks to the school if you must sell them. It is the system of extortion that they have put in place that I am really railing against. Students buy their books for hundreds of dollars and then sell them for less than 10, so that next year the university can sell them for hundreds again. It’s not right. It is the physical impetus for a culture of intellectual shabbiness.

Of course I am not equating the content of books with their physical presence, but I am equating one’s continued absorbtion of that content with their physical presence. It requires the presense of the book to recall the specific wording of a difficult argument or the exact figures of a certain statistic. It is thus their continued presence that prevent the things we learn in class from retreating to the hazy fog of memory, where our recollections become vague generalizations as opposed to the razor-blade clarity of the scholar, book in hand.

This conversation is too pointlessly verbose for me.

I sold my books for grocery money.

(Max, i think the thing is, some people collect books, some don’t. Speaking from personal experience, I occasionally keep a textbook I can foresee needing/enjoying in the future, such as my Norton Shakespeare. Others, such as my statistics textbook which I mostly used to complete problem sets, become lunch money.)

Oh, and Google renders all your arguments mostly moot. I stress mostly.

I hate popping up after every comment, but about the google bit - information online is often at most truncated and at least unverified and wrong. When, in the rare case, a book can be found online in its entirety, it is often an outdated translation (if its foreign). That’s why we read textbooks for our classes, and don’t merely look everything up on wikipedia (hopefully).

I’m willingly romanticizing the issue. I just get the impression that people are disconnecting intellectual activity with their life as a whole, and placing it in the realm of work or school. 52% of Americans have not read a single book in the last year.

In another note, I’ve been to the guy before and the bookstore, and ultimately they gave me more money for the same books.

Reader X,
Your comment communicates almost zero information.

I have no idea what you mean.

Kirk Larsen,
I love you.

what’s a book