Later in the day, after this post, I was frustrated by my post doing little for her particular situation and decided to do something about it.
When I was using a tablet pc, I routinely scanned in all my textbooks for easy markup and so I wouldn’t have to drag them to class. I initially thought of this, but her laptop is a 17 inch monstrosity and this wouldn’t work too well for her. I would, however, advise it for anyone who regularly brings a laptop to their classes. Personally, I suggest the Plustek Opticbook 3600. The software is, regrettably, PC only - but works fine with Parallels or VMWare (which is the best in my experience) or Bootcamp if you have an Intel Mac. Scanning an entire 200+ pg book generally only takes an hour or so, but I often just scanned a few chapters at a time.
So, what to do? Well, occasionally, the solution is so damn simple you don’t even realize it. Here’s the trick my friends…. Copy machine. Just go to your local copy machine, Kinko’s, whatever, and copy out the things you will need for class for the next month or so. Make sure you copy to both sides - bind them together somehow, and there you go. Instead of a 10 lbs book, you have a small packet that can fit in a folder.
05/09/2007 at 7:33 pm Permalink
This is an awesome idea: I have a book for my History of Western Civ class that we use infrequently, but I want to have the readings it if we use them. It cost me $7 at the school library to make copies of all of the sections that we’re using, but it has saved me!