How to save a surprising amount on textbooks
I'm home from another exciting first day of classes. While Yet Another Stats Course looks to be useful, if not especially titillating, I am enthused after the first meeting of Undisciplined Media Theories (this raffish title reveals that the course is not from my home department). I had met instructor Trebor Scholz briefly last fall after he organized Axel Bruns' visit to Buffalo, and I'm looking forward to working with him. The course looks like a lot of fun -- I'll finally be forced to pick up several books that have been languishing for years on my "to read" list, as well as several books which are completely new to me.
A student always looks at a substantial reading list, especially one that contains recent textbooks, with some trepidation. I probably could have found some of the thirteen books on the Undisciplined reading list at the library, but most of these are books I want to own anyway. List price for all the books is $370.55 -- a hefty chunk of my meager teaching assistant salary. Even considering the discounts provided by online retailers such as Amazon, the total cost for these books would be well over $300 before taxes and shipping were figured in. I managed to pick up these books for $176 and 20 minutes' work. Here are my tips:
- Mooch them, if possible: if you can't mooch from your friends, try BookMooch. BookMooch is a book trading site -- you list books you are willing to give away, and are then able to browse others' inventories and "mooch" their books. They'll send them to you for free (it sounds improbable, but thus far has a functional little economy). Unfortunately for me, none of the thousands of free books listed here were on my reading list.
- Compare prices: If you have to pay for a book, you probably want to spend as little as possible. But maybe you're willing to spend a little more to get a book without beer stains and moronic highlighting. The major second-had dealers, such as Amazon and Half, will generally have your book in a variety of conditions at a variety of prices. My used book search engine of choice is the lovably typo-ridden Bookfinder4u. With a single ISBN search, Bookfinder4u will return several pages of results from hundreds of online booksellers, neatly sortable by total price including shipping. When there are ten stores selling the book for the same price, it pays to pick out the one that's in the best condition.
- Look at different editions: of course, it's wise to check with your instructor before ordering the 2nd edition of a textbook that's currently in its 23rd revision, but buying slightly older editions can save a lot of money. Also, be sure to compare hardcover and softcover editions -- several of the books I purchased were significantly cheaper in hardcover.
These are my results. I could have gotten these books even cheaper, but I wanted books with unmarked pages, and I got hardcovers where the price difference wasn't significant. Note that my prices include shipping and any taxes.
| Title | List Price | My Price |
| Brown, J. S., Duguid, P. (2002) The Social Life of Information. | $25.95 | $8.70 |
| Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society. | $29.95 | $21.48 |
| Gillmor, D. (2004) We the Media. | $24.95 | $6.15 |
| Ellul, J. (1964) The Technological Society | $12.00 | $8.82 |
| Feenberg, A. (2002) Transforming Technology. | $24.95 | $9.15 |
| Hardin, R. (1982) Collective Action. | $25.95 | $8.85 |
| Keeble, L., Loader, B. eds. (2001) Community Informatics. | $48.95 | $28.75 |
| Standage, T. (1998) The Victorian Internet. | $22.00 | $7.20 |
| Sterling, B. (2005) Shaping Things. | $17.95 | $13.00 |
| Warschauer, M. (2003) Technology and Social Inclusion. | $35.00 | $16.47 |
| Wenger, E., et al. (2002) Cultivating Communities of Practice. | $32.95 | $18.70 |
| Willinsky, J. (2006) The Access Principle. | $34.95 | $18.65 |
| Winner, L. (1977) Autonomous Technology. | $35.00 | $10.44 |
| TOTAL: | $370.55 | $176.36 |
Feel free to leave your cheap book tips in the comments!
Subverting Wikiscience?
So this story is interesting on a lot of levels. Biologist blogger PZ Myers points out this brief article about a psychology grad student who infiltrated a geeky fundamentalist Christian conspiracy. According to the article, a baker's dozen of Pentacostal techheads from Texas are making a coordinated effort to undermine articles on subjects like evolution. From the article:
Empowered by God, and led by a charismatic, MIT, computer science sophomore (who also plays lead guitar in a Christian rock band), this squad-size cohort of Christian soldiers is chipping away at Wikiscience, in subject areas entirely predictable. Clever they are too, in taking advantage of Wikiethics, specifically NPOV (i.e., Neutral Point of View), where all views must be represented, even if demonstrably incorrect; any fundamentalist worth his salt can drive a truck threw such a loop hole, and they have begun doing so. Intelligent design and biblical floods are being commingled with Darwin and DNA. The process is so far more apparent on the discussion pages than on actual pages, where God’s soldiers employ a Pentecostal version of good cop, bad cop. The bad cop is an apparent Christian trying to interject religion where science contradicts his worldview, and the good cop(s) is disguised as an atheist lending support by invoking the NPOV rule.
Is this legit? We'll have to wait until "Yellow Rose's" dissertation comes out. Seems like a challenging IRB proposal. I mostly hope there is no anti-science conspiracy at work on Wikipeda, but if there is, I can't wait to read the exposé. While the NPOV criticism isn't a new one for Wikipedia, I'm interested to see how PZ's readers will debate the issue...
Counting down…
Summer is now gasping its last -- for me, this gasp was a week-long visit to rural Ontario. Of course, I couldn't pass up the Jolly Rogering at the Toronto Pirate Festival (curiously, I didn't win the prize for best pirate costume...)
Next week begins the madness of the fall semester. I'm facing a diverse-but-potentialy-interesting courseload and am instructing the freshman-level Intro to the Internet course. I've revamped the syllabus to reflect a more social and less technical approach towards understanding the internet, and look forward to getting it underway.
JP Lackaff and the cigar tree
A family legend goes something like this: In the 1870s, two gentlemen by the names of Jean-Pierre LaCaff and Francois LaCaff, cousins (more or less), made the journey to the US from their native Luxembourg. After a stop in Ellis Island, and some notes had been scratched in an immigration offical's ledger, they became John Peter (JP) Lackaff and Frank Lackaff. The briefly found themselves among fellow Luxembourgers in Minnesota, then accepted the government's offer of free land in an unsettled western territory -- north-central Nebraska. Frank briefly published a newspaper there before his wanderlust took him further west, and he ended up founding a massive Lackaff clan in the Pacific Northwest. JP, my great-great-grandfather, made a go of it as a rancher, and my family has been in the area ever since. This is a photo of these first American Lackaffs, probably taken in Minnesota. My favorite part is the curious potted "cigar tree" -- I wish I was in on the joke.
This photo of JP Lackaff and an unknown acquaintance is perhaps representative of the weather he found in his new country. I'm not sure how this photo was created -- I'm not at all a photography expert, but I'd guess the snowflakes were painted in after the fact. Also note the cigars, a common feature in photos of these early Lackaffs.
This photo, apparently sent from Luxembourg, is of JP's parents, Michel and Marguerite. A pipe, rather than a cigar, complete's great-great-great-grandfather Lackaff's stylish ensemble.
Liberating C-SPAN: Metavid opens Congress to the bloggy masses
While I was browsing the posters at Wikimania last weekend, I came across a fellow standing next to an open laptop. "Is that your poster?" I asked. He somewhat sheepishly replied in the affirmative, and proceeded to demonstrate his project -- Metavid. Metavid is an interface to archived video footage from the floors of the US Senate and the House. Metavid provides easy access to this footage to bloggers, documentarians, video mashup artists, and anyone else.
Metavid allows for fulltext keyword searching using the closed captioning of the video, as well as searches limited by speaker and timeframe. I could easily search, for example, for all comments made by my representatives on network neutrality in the past two weeks. If I found videclips that were especially noteworthy, I could download the clip as a high-quality Theora video file, or post a streaming version on my blog à la YouTube.
In his paper, Metavid co-developer Michael Dale provides an interesting discussion of his project's re-appropriation of C-SPAN's public domain footage. C-SPAN has a habit of nastygramming bloggers and others who use their footage, even when said footage is from government-owned cameras (and therefore in the public domain). Metavid removes C-SPAN's trademarked logo from the footage it archives, or "de-encapsulates" it, eliminating C-SPAN's primary ground for legal threats.
While the application remains rough around the edges -- the available video archive is incomplete, the interface is prickly, and browser support is limited to Firefox + an unusal video extension-- this is a very cool project with a lot of potential. Today Techcrunch is profiling a proprietary video sharing application that will also allow for searching within videos and time-specific interaction, and this is sure to be a hot area in the very near future. In the meantime, it's great to see an open project like Metavid entering the fray early.
Further info: another paper about the project here, project blog here.