Life After Textbooks

Some years ago, there was a Glendale College student who vowed to keep all his textbooks. He moved several cartons of textbooks when he transferred to UCLA. A small closet full of books went with him to his master's program at Cal Berkeley. He drove a pickup truck full of textbooks across the country to Harvard, where he was accepted into a doctoral program. Old textbooks lined the walls of his one-room apartment in Cambridge. With each semester at Harvard, he added to his stacks of textbooks, eventually needing a ladder because the books had reached the ceiling. He placed a hand-written motivational message above the huge wall of books.

His single-minded devotion to his studies was about to pay off. His classes were completed. His oral exams were a breeze. His dissertation was done. Now all that was left was to defend his dissertation to five Harvard professors, each of them asking the most difficult questions possible. He wrote down all the questions he could imagine being asked, and rehearsed his answers. He had terrific answers for every question except for one. That question, deceptively simple, could be answered with something he learned many years before in Mass Comm 101. But where was the textbook? He searched the towering stacks. Hmmm...it was near the bottom.

But maybe if he slid the book out very quickly the rest of the stack would be unaffected, like a waiter yanking a tablecloth off a table so quickly that the dishes, glasses and silverware stay in place. He got a good grip on the Mass Comm textbook... one... two... THREE!

That student, one of the finest to ever graduate from Glendale College, didn't show up for his dissertation defense. Several days later, a worried professor found him buried under a huge pile of textbooks. Near the ceiling, the student's hand-written motivational sign was now clearly visible:

"PH.D means PILED HIGHER and DEEPER"

This story is apocryphal. Clearly, Your Humble Blogger had too much time on his hands over Spring Break. But the story makes two points. First, the Internet is a very effective rumor mill. More about that in a few weeks.

Second, the story is slightly believable only because every college student is faced with what to do with old textbooks. And by the end of a college career, a student can accumulate quite a pile of them.

Some very inventive students have devised an answer, cclist.org. It is sort of like Craigslist, but only for textbooks. In keeping with today's student theme, the source for this Medianote is an article in the El Vaquero.

Questions...

•Does cclist fill a basic need? Why or why not?

•Would you consider cclist to sell your textbooks?

•What do you usually do with your old textbooks?

•Would you be more likely or less likely to keep e-textbooks?

•Do you feel cclist will help you save money?

•How is cclist an example of disintermediation?