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?