Like all of you, I was absolutely thrilled to spend a lovely $450 at Student Book Store last week. Score! Who wouldn’t rather have a stack of cheaply printed books that will be useless in 16 weeks, than a month’s rent, a round-trip ticket to California, a new bicycle or whatever suits your pleasure?
Luckily for me, my pleasure is spending money. I owe the larger part of this immensely beneficial transaction to my $140 Spanish textbook. The best part is, this is the second time I’ve experienced the joy of buying this book. Those bills in my wallet were such a burden — thank you McGraw-Hill for relieving me of that weight. Why use the same book for two semesters? It’s much better to spend $140, use half of the book for the first semester and then buy the second edition of the same book — of which you only need the latter half — for the next semester. Online retail and trade sites such as Amazon.com and allMSU.com had me worried there — I thought I might only spend a couple of hundred dollars on books this semester. The horror! Those $20 bills are much too rough to use as toilet paper.
