Textbooks

This past Friday, I was talking to a friend whose son is in middle school. She’d recently been to Back to School Night (and wondered, on a side note, why in the world back to school night happened a month after school started). She found out that the school has no textbooks. (No, this is not some progressive private school, but a regular school district school.) No textbooks, she wondered. When asked how they learn stuff, the teacher said she spends her Fridays making copies of the next week’s work for all the students. Okay, my friend thought, this cannot be saving money or the environment if each teacher is printing out thousands of pages of material for the students to look at. And since the students work on the sheets then turn them in, they have no textbook or worksheets to take home and refer to, so what happens if a student doesn’t understand something - they have nothing to study at home.

The good news is my friend plans to get more involved in the school and her son’s classes. The bad news is she’ll have to take off from work on Fridays. She’s going to offer to do all that copy-making for her son’s Math teacher so she can figure out how this is possibly going to work. Apparently the school considers it a success since, although it’s my friend’s son’s first year at this school, it’s not the school’s first year to use no books.

Maybe some colleges have a better idea.

The Jacksonville Observer ran an article about the University Press of Florida and Florida colleges.

Pay $200 for a O-chem book at the campus bookstore or $0 for an online version? Tough choice? Not really. And it may become a reality for some Florida students in the near future.

Right now they only have about 90 books in their listing, but they’re working on more. Students get the book online for free and can refer to it as much as they want or download it to their computers.

Research released by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that students spend an average of $900 per year on books. And they don’t always get a lot of that money back.

Many bookstores will buy back books, but at a significantly lower cost than what they were sold for originally. Some stores will not buy certain books back because they also come with a CD that expires.

Of course, there will be those students who want or need a physical copy of a book.

And for some students, who will still prefer to have a physical copy of the book, they can pay a much lower price to have a hard copy printed and bound. However, it will be a paperback, and not the typical hardback textbook normally sold in stores.

Clearly, not every title will be available. Some may never be. But it’s a start. Maybe this will be a catalyst to getting my friend’s son some textbooks.