Cheap books are OK

So, yeah. I got back to Gainesville on Monday, and the first day of classes was Tuesday. This week's been pretty good so far except for the cold weather, which I'm not too fond of. It's supposed to rain tomorrow and Saturday, and apparently people have heard that there's a very slight chance of snow flurries and are blowing it out of proportion. In Florida, we get excited about the possibility of snow.

My classes are all okay so far because I haven't done too much in them yet. Two of my four classes are taught by professors whose classes I've had before. Neither of them are really great, but I'd rather have a mediocre professor than one who might be terrible. I am risk-averse.

I'm not sure why, but I wasn't allotted any textbook money from the great State of Florida this semester, so I had to fend for myself. Buying my books from the university bookstore would have set me back $500, even if I got as many of them used as possible. Fortunately, I found much better deals online with Book Burro.

The books I did get were so cheap because they're all international editions. Apparently textbook companies sell identical copies of their books for lower prices in South and Southeast Asia. They all have warnings on them saying they're not authorized for sale outside those regions. For example:

If you purchased this book within the United States or Canada you should be aware that it has been wrongfully imported without the approval of the Publisher or the Author. [emphasis added]

"Wrongfully," in the eyes of the publisher, but not illegally. The first-sale doctrine prevents from publishers from dictating how their books can be sold after they are sold for the first time. This is why secondhand bookstores exist. The publishers would shut them all down in an instant if they could, but they can't, and the rest of us are better off for it.

Tomorrow Katja will be coming to Gainesville. I've been looking forward to this day for a while now, so I'm pretty excited. I've made a list of some things that we can do here in town, but it seems that she'll want to do a lot of relaxing. I'm good for that, too. It makes things less hectic for me. But who knows when I'll have time to blog next? Hopefully soon, but not too soon.

Peter over at Greatplay.net explains Why 2012 Will Not Be The End of the World.

Quizipedia is a fill-in-the-blank game with sentences taken from Wikipedia articles. (Via J-Walk Blog)