I ride the bus to cam­pus, most days. This entails stand­ing in queues with under­grad­u­ate stu­dents, grad­u­ate stu­dents, and maybe some young fac­ulty. [Old fac­ulty appear only to ride their bicy­cles, or sleep in their offices. I hypoth­e­size this because every­body I see dri­ving a car is on the phone at that hour, and in my expe­ri­ence older fac­ulty do not have phones with them. QED] If they’re not in the queue with me, then they’re strid­ing past on their way from Hither Com­mons to Yon 1201 South.

Any­way, almost every one of these peo­ple [even the ones on phones] are car­ry­ing a satchel, ruck­sack, port­fo­lio, brief­case, back­pack, or steamer trunk on wheels. Except for those par­tic­u­larly effi­cient young per­sons who appear to be capa­ble of mak­ing do with just rolled-​​up drug­store spi­ral note­book, a well-​​chewed Bic ball point and a base­ball cap cocked at 48° from true — alter­nately a tiny fringed glis­ten­ing purse con­tain­ing the void left when the phone was removed, some sort of over­whelm­ing Fra­grant Source, and a small quan­tity of Lycra — every­body has one or more books.

For tractability’s sake, let us define four classes of pedes­tri­ans, iden­ti­fied by sight and dif­fer­en­ti­ated by the num­ber of school­books they are prob­a­bly car­ry­ing: no_​books, few_​books, some_​books, and many_​books. We will model the num­ber of books car­ried by a mem­ber of a given class as a ran­dom vari­able defined by a tri­an­gu­lar prob­a­bil­ity dis­tri­b­u­tion with nodes (0,0,3), (0,3,6), (1,5,9) and (4,7,11) respec­tively. These num­bers (which rep­re­sent the min, mode and max of the dis­tri­b­u­tion) are of course based on pure com­mon sense, plus the detailed sam­pling I per­formed in the course of an after­noon (N=3. Plus me).

With over­whelm­ingly earnest dili­gence, I have com­piled the fol­low­ing obser­va­tions, col­lected pri­mar­ily dur­ing the com­mut­ing peri­ods of the last three school days, and also while I was drink­ing a smoothie of some sort (I’m about 30% sure it was mango):

• no_​books: 42
• few_​books: 71
• some_​books: 55
• many_​books: 39

Now if I know one thing, it’s books, and own many of just the sort being car­ried around by these peo­ple. School­books fall into two main cat­e­gories: Dover lit­er­a­ture, and clay-​​coated tech­ni­cal doorstop. The for­mer weighs in at about 300 grams on aver­age, while the lat­ter is typ­i­cally more like a kilo­gram or two at least. About ¹⁄₁₀ of the books on offer this semes­ter at the Uni­ver­sity book­store were paper­back, and ⁹⁄₁₀ doorstop.

Pre­sum­ing that at this Large Mid­west­ern Uni­ver­sity there are about 5000 peo­ple walk­ing around on a given morn­ing, and that all of them carry satchels filled with books accord­ing to the dis­tri­b­u­tion implied by the data above, and that every per­son has to get from Hither Com­mons to Yon 1002 or vice versa, a dis­tance of 500 meters on aver­age: How much effort should we require fac­ulty instruc­tors to expend in try­ing to com­pile free, online courseware?

Lazy thought­less slaves of the Intellectual-​​Publishing Com­plex. No, not you, the other fac­ulty mem­bers. Surely not you. Think of all that stu­pid mat­ter being packed around. Think of how many stu­dents are stu­pid enough to just high­light the hell out of it, mak­ing it use­less for future stu­dents? How many will keep it, just in case. How many will throw it away, leaf by leaf, from the high­est win­dow in Blatz Hall the day of their final exam.

Is it so hard to type stuff? To say inter­est­ing things that the stu­dents write down? If you must force stu­dents to use a book in class, why not have a few copies on a shelf in the class­room so they don’t need to drag them around in cir­cles all year? Aren’t they sup­posed to be lis­ten­ing to your crys­talline orthoepy and glean­ing din­gle­ber­ries of wis­dom from your mel­liflu­ous pronouncements?

Or do you just make them scared enough that they use the book as a fetish object to keep you at bay?

It’s not like you make money on these books your­selves, after all. Even if you wrote one. You are just their vec­tor.

Extra credit: How much bonus cash money should be given to a fac­ulty mem­ber for devel­op­ing a free, online course pack­age for their class? Assume 100 stu­dents a year are taught, the aver­age book (of either type) costs $50 [PDF link], the course­ware can be used for 5 years, and the cost of books will increase by 10% per annum indef­i­nitely. Hint: you may find it use­ful to con­sider the phys­i­cal work done in trans­port­ing this weight of books over this period, and esti­mate the cost of labor at the present min­i­mum wage.

Alter­nately, how much should the pay of thought­less instruc­tors, who merely pick three thick books from a cat­a­log, be docked?