No, I don’t really want to buy your book
Written by Arielle Stevenson, Oct 11, 2011, 0 Comments
I am tired of buying my professors’ books. The combination of often-bad cover art and spending additional money on a professor’s book against your own will is futile. I understand our school is a working university and professors are expected to publish. Sometimes it isn’t so bad and I really enjoy the book. But more often than not it’s like being asked if their dress makes them look fat.
In my home office, there are two shelves of former professor’s books. Some are great. Others cost a ton, read as smoothly as a brick road and are worthless after the class is over. It’s awkward and it’s filling up my bookshelves.
Inside the USFSP Campus Barnes & Noble is an entire shelf of books dedicated to published university professors. I genuinely think this is a cool thing. While many teachers profess so much knowledge about another writer’s text, our guys are slugging it out and doing it for themselves.
Being that a liberal arts education should seek to teach critical thinking skills, making students buy your book can be a bad idea overall. We aren’t all total idiots and maybe your book doesn’t really jazz us up like you’d hoped it would. A word to the wise, don’t refer to your book in the third person. It doesn’t translate well and we aren’t that formal at USFSP.
Being that I am on the eve of graduating (pending I don’t get in trouble for this column) I feel like I can finally say what so many whisper in hushed tones. I don’t really want to buy your book just because it is your book when I really don’t know you. Hell, I have to buy your books before we’ve even met. It’s kind of like meeting the parents on the first date—awkward and potentially costly.
It’s such an obvious ego boost too; we are paying them to teach us and we have to buy their book. A double whammy for sure. And with everything from tuition, parking, and fees going up, I’m too broke to buy all the books you didn’t sell. Now, if it is a good book, which I’ll admit is subjective, I want to buy it. I want to support you as an educator who writes good books I like.
There are only a handful of books assigned by the authors that have really benefited my education as much it did their bank accounts. I’m all for buying books. But please professors, assign your written words as a last resort and give a good reason so it doesn’t sting so much as I sit in your class, listening to you, quote yourself.
