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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Ditch paper textbooks this semester to save money and the environment

Have you ever walked to class and thought to yourself: “Wow, I would love for my backpack to be even heavier.”

No. No one has. The perpetual hot, humid weather that Gainesville experiences most of the year is multiplied when your backpack is full of books and binders. No one wants to scramble into a lecture just to have everyone behind them checking out their sweaty T-shirt.

Sure, you could wear dark colors or maybe even buy one of those backpacks with wheels. But what if I told you there’s an even simpler option, an option that could also potentially save you money every semester?

The secret? Ditch the paper. All of it.

Let’s start with the heaviest objects occupying most student’s backpacks, textbooks. Not only do traditional books weigh more, they also cost a lot more. In my last 3 1/2 years at UF, I can’t remember ever finding the best price for a textbook at the campus bookstore.

The internet is full of resources for finding cheap books. In my experience, however, Amazon is the best for two reasons. First, they outright beat the competition in regards to prices. If you don’t believe me, look at what you just paid for books and then compare it with what Amazon charges.

Second, between about 70 to 80 percent of my previous textbooks had a Kindle e-book edition. This is absolutely your best option. Not only are they significantly cheaper than the hard copies sold by Amazon, but they are available to read on any of your electronic devices — immediately lightening the load you carry to class every day.

Another enormous benefit of ditching the paper is that all books instantly become searchable documents. That means all it takes is a few seconds to find a specific keyword or paragraph anywhere in the book. This is extremely helpful for identifying terms when you’re studying for a quiz or test.

Despite all of this, UF does offer a few helpful tools for students looking to get rid of heavy hard copies. Many narrative-style books teachers assign can be found for free on the websites of UF libraries. Much like Amazon, lots of these books are also searchable and downloadable, and did I mention free?

So now that we’ve taken a few pounds of books out of our backpacks, what’s next? Pretty much everything else.

For any Mac users out there, Pages is a free alternative for Microsoft Word. It has note-taking templates that will have you throwing your traditional notebooks in the trash. Like e-books, electronic notes allow you to search and identify keywords much faster. Personally, I label my notes by chapter and date, so when I’m studying for midterms and finals, I can instantly jump to sections I’m looking for.

Lastly, the hidden benefit of eliminating paper from different aspects of your life is environmental conservation. According to the University of Southern Indiana, about 1 billion trees of paper in the U.S. is wasted. The world only has a finite amount of land and resources available, and it’s up to us to conserve where we can. Take a look in your backpack and see how you can do your part by getting rid of excess amounts of paper — it may even let you take a load off your shoulders.

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Elijah Rawls is a UF journalism senior. His column appears on Fridays.

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