Textbook Surgery !

DirectEntryNinja · Sep 16, 2010

I know breaking down textbooks has been discussed on here before - just wanted to share my experience with doing this. I hauled 2 monsters to staples this morning and gleefully performed book surgery.

the breakdown:

2 books; about 1700 pages each

had to cut the hard covers off myself before they could go into the spine-removal-machine. The girl at staples handed me a pair of scissors, it was pretty easy. They also needed to be in small sections (they were around 3-4") and it took some serious muscle to get through the glue binding without destroying pages.

If i had wanted to spiral bind these, i could have broken them into 1" sections at the cost of about $3.50 per section. Unfortunately I got caught up in an 'artistic vision' and decided I wanted them 3-hole-punched so I could move/sort sections and carrying specific topics around with me.

The girl at Staples was very busy. I could have left them there to be 3-hole-punched, 100 pages at a time, for a day or two. They would have charged for this. Instead I ended up being handed the punch and doing it myself, for free. Yeesh. It took awhile, and my arm is killing me, but it's done. The punch removed about one word per hole, 3 per page - but it doesn't look critically damaged to me.

Total cost was $28. That includes cutting off the spine, hole punching myself, and buying 2 large binders to put everything in & and one small binder to actually carry sections back & forth to campus in. I think the cost would have been pretty similar for spiral binding had I gone that route.

Stepping back, I calculated that I paid $147 for these 2 books (used but in good condition). So $173/2 = $86.5 per book, decent condition, and now in portable format. I should probably add $5 for the ibuprofen I will need to recover from carrying both books back and forth to Staples :)

I wouldn't recommend this hassle for every textbook. I checked syllabi pretty carefully before choosing books that I think I will rely most heavily on in the coming year (pathophys and med-surg). My entire goal in doing this was to avoid carrying huge textbooks every day and destroying my back before I'm done with my first semester. THAT I would definitely recommend for everyone.