Your Humble Blogger happened across this list and thought some of my Gentle Readers would enjoy it. It seems the great Ed Fuller asked members of the Swarthmore faculty to pick one book to recommend to incoming freshfolk, and this is the resulting list. It’s an interesting list for a variety of reasons, but the one I focused on was the picture it gives of the college. One of the Spanish Dept. profs recommends Don Quixote, but another recommends Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; one physics prof recommends Borges and another Feynman. The accompanying notes combine academic bullshit, political correctness, wry humor, jargon, pretentiousness, helpfulness, defensiveness, and insight. One of the profs mentions that she checked to see if the library had the book before recommending it.
By the way, the list is posted on the web site of the bookstore, in a section that also encourages students to buy their texts cheaper from overseas retailers, and notes how many students seem to be able to work from library copies. What an odd place Swarthmore is. But that’s nostalgia talking.
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-Vardibidian.
It’s an interesting article about overseas textbook pricing. My experience shopping for academic books overseas has always been the opposite — the prices are quite a bit higher there. And that was when the dollar wasn’t in a controlled descent.
As a publisher, I certainly don’t charge different prices for US customers vs. overseas, except that my shipping rates are substantially higher for overseas (big surprise). Some overseas bookstores avoid that by using shipping consolidators in the US.
It wouldn’t surprise me, though, to find that there are a few overseas bookstores who can sell textbooks for substantially less; after all, there are a few overseas bookstores who have reduced one of their largest costs to zero by not paying their invoices from publishers. I’m not quite clear on the societal benefit from the laws that prevent me from naming names of overseas corporate deadbeats.
Not that there aren’t some domestic bookstores who do the same. I remember having to go to the Narnes and Boble (no relation to any actual enormous chain) corporate offices in NYC once to get them to start responding to invoices. So it’s heartening to see that the Swarthmore bookstore has remained independent.
[Ed, I know you’ll receive the notification on this comment a year late, but my comment was timely. Really.]