Buying and Selling Books

If you're looking to buy or sell books, the way to make the most and get the cheapest books is generally by selling them to other students. There are two easy ways of doing this: the Facebook Marketplace and the Wesleyan Classifieds. Both are essentially identical in functionality: you list an item with a short description, price, and an optional picture and people contact you if they're interested in what you're selling.

The problem right now is that very few people are using either of them. Changes to Facebook have made the Marketplace much less visible over the past year. I bought all of my books my fall semester last year from people on the Facebook Marketplace--there were several pages of books being listed for the fall semester. Now instead of a few pages of books there are only a few books in total. The Wesleyan Classifieds are only a little better. They're a relatively new creation and pretty convenient, but the link has been hidden quite well in the walls of text that are our e-portfolios. (If you're looking for the link, it's all the way to the right, in the 'Tools & Links' section near the top.)

So if you have old books you no longer need, list them. If you're looking for books, take a look through what's available. Hopefully that list will grow at least a bit over the next few days. And remember that you can return books to Broad Street until the 28th of January if you've already bought them--just make sure you have the receipt.

Donate books to College-in-Prison Initiative

If you're tired of settling for spare change for your textbooks, get in the seasonal spirit of giving and donate them to the Wesleyan College-in-Prison Initiative. Starting next fall, we hope to provide inmates at nearby prisons with access to Wesleyan courses, taught by Wesleyan professors. But we need books for this to happen. Your books.

Drop boxes will be located at Usdan, Olin, SciLi, Fisk, and Broad Street Books. Any and all donations, especially in the humanities and social sciences, will be greatly appreciated.

[Via Noah Gapsis '10; originally posted 2008-12-01.]

Talk: "The Book Artist as Social Critic"

Library Assistant Jennifer Hadley writes:

Art and politics! What a mix! Head of Special Collections and University Archivist Suzy Taraba will talk about how artists use the medium of the book as both an art object and a means for promoting social critique and political discussion. After the talk, there will be a reception in the Smith Reading Room and a chance—without food or drink, please!—to see and read the featured books in the Davison Rare Book Room. Don't miss this great opportunity to take a break from studying while still fulfilling your desire for political engagement and art appreciation.

Date: Wednesday, Dec. 10
Time: 4:15 PM
Place: Smith Reading Room, Olin

Spotted outside of Olin: dumpster full o' books

Sitting in the parking lot between Clark and Olin is a huge dumpster full of books. You might wonder, why are all those books in the garbage?

I spoke with Liz Mainella, Serials Administrator at Olin Library, and found out that the books are being either discarded or transfered as part of the University's JSTOR Journal Offsite Storage Project:

In order to free up much-needed space in Olin Library, the library is undertaking a project to determine which bound volumes, available electronically through JSTOR, to consider withdrawing from the library's collection. These bound volumes will be retrievable from the Five Colleges Library Depository, an off-site storage facility.

Mainella assured me that all of the books being tossed will remain accessible to Wesleyan students. All the books are accessible through JSTOR, and the original bound copies will still be available through Wesleyan's affiliation with the Five College Library Depository.

Mainella also noted that the books that don't end up in the Depository will be recycled. That's a lot of paper!

Photo and tip courtesy of Cesar Medina '09.

University Already Screwing You Enough? Sell Your Books Back to Someone Else!

Craig Ewer '10 writes in to tell us about another option for selling your books:

Broadstreet won't take your book?

Belltower Books is buying back every book you have!

We pay Cash-money!

Go to to www.belltowerbooks.com to make an appointment or look around campus for our tables.

Craig adds that you can make appointments and they will actually come to your door, and I'll add that while you're probably going to get just as ripped off, at least it won't the University who gets the pleasure of doing it.

More free books

Holly's post below reminded me: the science fiction/fantasy publisher Tor Books is offering a promotion where they release one free e-book a week for nine weeks. The e-books are available in mobi, pdf, or html formats, and they're all DRM free.

Three books have been released so far:

• Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
• Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
• Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

You can sign up for the promotion here. If you're interested in any of the three books that have already been released, I would be more than willing to forward them to you--something Tor is encouraging. If people show interest, I'll set up a separate e-mail address to forward them to anyone who's interested.

Wesleyan professors' books reviewed in NYT

The New York Times is good for more than telling us how rich Yale is. As Ashik Siddique '10 noticed, the Times also reviewed two books by Wesleyan professors this weekend.

Chair of the Film Department Jeanine Basinger's recent book The Star Machine appeared twice this weekend:

• Hot Properties
• When the Studios Called the Shots, and the Close-Ups

Also, an article called Cartoon Villains reviewed Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy, by Professor of Religion Peter Gottschalk and Wes alumnus Gabriel Greenberg (see right).

While checking out these reviews for myself, I also came across the Times' Education Life section. I haven't read any of it yet, but it looks interesting and has features on campus protests, summer internships, and S.D.S..

Harry Potter Withdrawal?

Are you sad? I'm sad. It's all over. I know how it ends. I know what happens. And granted, while I should be (and am) reading other, arguably more important things, I still don't feel comfortable with the empty fantasy void that Harry Potter used to fill. Thus, I've already turned onto a new series which, conveniently, is being released as a major film later this year (I really like reading a book before the movie comes out because otherwise I can't get the actors out of my head while reading it...like my Ron looked a helluva lot different than the Rupert Grint, for example).

His Dark Materials is a series that has been recommended to me near since birth because of the incessant insistence of my hometown best friend, who, if I were to rank her obsessions, it would be as follows: 1. Lord of the Rings, 2. Harry Potter, 3. Dragons, 4. Baking cookies, 5. Cigarettes and 6. His Dark Materials. Seeing as I don't smoke, my choice seems obvious.

His Dark Materials Trilogy - This three-part series includes: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman, will be released in December. From the Amazon review: "In the epic trilogy His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman unlocks the door to worlds parallel to our own. Dæmons and winged creatures live side by side with humans, and a mysterious entity called Dust just might have the power to unite the universes--if it isn't destroyed first."

But some other books that I recommend for Post-Harry Rehab:

• The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (film)
  
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman (film)
• The Chronicles of Narniaby C.S. Lewis (film, among many, and Disney is filming two more)
  
• Stardust by Neil Gaiman (Movie starring starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and an incredibly creepy looking Claire Danes comes out next month!)

• 

Some others that I've not gotten around to reading that I've been yelled at about by said friend:

• Eragon by Christopher Paolini (film)
  
• Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

Woo. Soak up the last of summer, guys, because soon it'll be back to critical theory and chemistry for the lot of ya.

Got a favorite? Let us know!

What Other Freshmen are Reading this Summer

U.S. News and World Report dishes about what other colleges across the country are making their incoming freshmen read this summer (besides Harry Potter):

Case Western Reserve University
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
by David K. Shipler

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
The Life of Pi
by Yann Martel

Skidmore College
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
by Tracy Kidder

Smith College
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
by Marjane Satrapi

University of Dayton
The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen
by David Bornstein

University of Washington
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert

Colgate University
The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth Change
by Tim Flannery

Seton Hall University
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini

College of Wooster
The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John Cronin

Books that are Totally Legal to Read Online

Many people at this school at any given time are reading books so old that their copyright has expired (or they never had a US copyright). What does that mean? It means it's perfectly legal for you to read these books online and not buy the book.

So for example, you need to read Pride and Prejudice for class. Where can you read it?

• You can search for it at Netlibrary, a service Wesleyan subscribes to (which contains both ebooks out of copyright and some newer ones).

• You can try Project Gutenberg.

• Want to listen to it on your iPod? Try LibriVox, it's a group site where people volunteer to read parts of the book to create an audio version.

• Or you can just google "Pride and Prejudice eBook." Many sites now redistribute the texts freely.