...or, "That's life, with books," to those non-Frenchies out there.
Against my better judgement, what with the happenings of last semester, I've started researching my required and non-required textbooks for my next round of classes. In my head, I had guesstimated roughly $400 or so for the cost of books and lab manuals, and, suffice it to say that my guesstimating skills, at least in the realm of school books, are not just rusty, but corroded and inept.
Three classes, one lab, and about $700 is what I'm looking at for next semester's books. That's right - not tuition, but books.
I suppose that the upside to all of this is that these books will likely stay with me throughout the remainder of my nursing school adventure, with the exception of maybe my microbiology text. The downside to all of this is that they are hella expensive, in case you missed that point one paragraph ago.
At some point, I would assume that textbooks will all be sold and read online, something which I have mixed feelings about. I love the smell of a book - any book - just about as much as I love the smell of baking cookies or the inside of the Home Depot (trust me - just take a big ol' sniff the next time you go!). I also love highlighting and underlining and making notes to myself on the pages; I love dog-earing and flagging and the literal and mental weightiness of a book. I love looking at a book after I've finshed reading it, and contemplating the wealth that I have gained from its inches of pages...unless it was last summer's Psych book, in which case, well, the wealth was traded for CRAZY!
With online books, all of those things would be lost, but I also have to think that maybe a century (or less) ago, there might have been some dreamy, romantic diarist penning an entry about the greatness of writing with ink on paper. I'm sure there would be some element of disgust if he or she could observe me click-click-clicking out this blog entry. Does change and advancement of technology always equal the loss of some elegant process? I hope not. Maybe one day skimming "pages" on a Kindle will be just as romantic as the thought of Abe Lincoln stretched out on his young belly in front of a fire, flipping through the pages of a book.
On second thought, that doesn't sound romantic at all. Poor Abe was probably freezing his you-know-what off. Maybe I'll take the Kindle and modern conveniences after all.
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