Looks like the Boston State House will be looking into the true value of the multimedia that accompanies textbooks:

State House hearing focuses on costs of college textbooks

A month into the fall semester, Nathassia Torchon has already had two tests in her precalculus class and is approaching her first history exam. But the Massachusetts Bay Community College student said she could not afford the $330 price tag for two of the required textbooks until this week.

“They always tell you 20 hours is good enough to work and go to school full time,” said Torchon, 21, of Mattapan. “I have to work three jobs to pay for two books.”

Also of interest:

Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education with the Association of American Publishers, said one of the most popular college art books is required to be sold with a CD that includes thousands of high-resolution images.

“You take that apart and neither of them will be of any value to anybody,” Hildebrand said.

Full article can be found on here.

I think this is actually a good thing for publishers.  Most “media ancillaries” don’t add that much value to the book itself; publishers create them to ensure that each of their books can match up against their competitor’s.  (This book has a CD-ROM, and that one doesn’t – ergo this book gets adopted by the school system.)

In reality, the entire package (books, CDs, media, etc) should be judged based on how well they educate students on new concepts, not whether they can close adoptions.  However like many industries, the need to close the sale often wins out over the need to demonstrate the effectiveness of the product.

I finished and mailed out a story called “Red & Blue” – a short-short story (500 words) covering the birth, life, and passing of two civilizations.  So far I’ve gotten 3 rejection letters and 1 e-mail saying “not reading at this time.”

Replying to an earlier post, a friend of mine pointed out Stephen King’s method of dealing with rejection letters:

As a young writer, King nailed a long, railroad spike into his bedroom wall, which he proudly hung all of his rejection letters from.  Years passed, and he had stacked rejection letters all the way to the edge of
the spike, until, one day, one of his stories was published.

From then on, for each story that was published, he would remove a rejection letter from the spike.

I think you can pretty much guess what happened next for young Stephie King.

I was thinking of doing something similar, but I think that the technique above may only work if you become a full-time writer.  My original story was actually accepted by a fiction magazine after being rejected by 6 others – using King’s method I would need to publish 6 more short stories to clean off the spike.

My technique is much more simple – recycle the rejection letters into scrap paper.  If I need to print a Google Map, no problem – just grab a letter and print on the back of it.  I think seeing the stack of letters would only dishearten me, rather than encourage me to keep going.

Right now I’m looking at the back of a letter from an assistant editor saying that “Red, Blue” didn’t grab him.  On the back I’ve written a to-do list with several tasks, with the last one reading: “Blog about recycling rejection letters.”

Mission accomplished.  Time to throw out the to-do list and start writing a new story.