The textbook racket industry

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SMBC dramatizes an all-too-common dynamic in the textbook industry. The initial negotiation:

That "one other matter":

The solution?

The aftercomic:


A series of more recent takes on a related issue, from Dumbing of Age:


(The mouseover title for that one is worth noting: "dang gendered spellings")



For those unfamiliar with the DoA cast, the key characters in this sequence are Robin, Jason, and Dorothy


And for a smidge of linguistic relevance, here are the online "lecture notes" (==texts) for recent editions of a couple of my courses: ling0001 and ling2250.

(…and no, Penn's Linguistics Department doesn't have — or contemplate having — 9,999 courses. It's just that Penn's Registrar recently outsourced itself to a company whose data model insists rigidly that all courses must have four-digit numbers…)



1 Comment

  1. Olaf Zimmermann said,

    March 24, 2024 @ 8:17 am

    No more "101" jokes then?

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