And so it begins again ....

The search for reasonably priced textbooks, that is!

Something that I have heard about for the first time this year is textbook swapping sites like TextSwap or Textlister, which allows you to buy, sell, or trade used textbooks.

Me, I've been pretty lucky overall - my undergrad was in English, so I was able to find most of the books my sister couldn't get for me used, or at least easily through Amazon.ca. I also have been known to use Project Gutenberg for older stuff.

Since I've been in grad school, we've been given a lot of photocopies - in many cases, we only need one chapter out of particular book, if that - the photocopying gets expensive, but it sure is preferable to having to buy books and then only needing them for one stinking chapter!

Anyway - what about you? Anyone used any of these sites? Would you?

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Ontario Government Reneges on Textbook Grant

A year after the Ontario Government announced that it was going to support all college and university students with a $150 textbook grant, they have reneged on their commitment and now announced that instead of raising the amount as they had promised, they will be slashing it.

Students who receive OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Program) funding will be the only ones that will get the textbook grant - and the amount will remain at $150 rather than the $225 that was promised.

A similar grant for students who go to a school more than 80km from their home (which I never heard about or I would certainly have applied) is also now being restricted to only OSAP eligible students.

What this decision does - aside from demonstrating that the Ontario government does not follow through on their commitments - is to further remove support from those people who because they work and made good financial decisions, or were born to or married people who did - do not qualify for student funding.

If you have retirement savings or property, the Ontario government will not support your education - not even with loans that you have to pay back - and not even with a grant that in many programs covers only the cost of at most one or two of your textbooks.

So much for the Ontario government's supposed commitment to education.

Source: The Toronto Star, 2-May-09; Louise Brown

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Textbooks

What do you do with your no-longer-needed textbooks?

Me, I tend to keep them ... although I did clear some out today while I was reorganizing bookshelves... just not any from my university studies - it was some old and now pretty much obsolete computer texts that I finally managed to part with. From back when I did my diploma in Computer Programming.

My English texts are mostly keepers - at least for now... although I do seem to have multiple copies of some, so I could presumably thin those out a bit, I suppose. If it wasn't so gosh-darned expensive to mail books to the US I'd have a contest, maybe!

At least in English, they don't become obsolete! When I think of how much I paid for some of those computer texts... yikes!

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