The amen corner will nod its assent, but the question remains: how much is a fair price to pay for an e-book? The boilerplate answer—whatever the market will bear—will not suffice. You can forget about the textbook definitions because this issue is going nuclear. A lot of people believe that charging $10 or more for the portability and convenience of an e-book is ridiculous. The book publishers haven’t helped their cause by doing a poor job explaining their case. If they’re not careful, they risk getting Napsterized. Though piracy has already started, it hasn’t become rife. At least not yet.

But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts - that we can know without knowing - really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It’s wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn’t mean that the contents of our memory doesn’t matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we’re lucky, wisdom.

The fact is that nontenured and non-tenure-track faculty are toiling in undesirable positions at low pay and subsidizing the interests and security of tenured faculty members whose performance is not necessarily superior to nontenured faculty or even compatible with the needs and interests of students or the institutional mission.

If someone stood in front of your office and lit $100 bills from your petty cash kitty on fire, you’d call the cops. But people at work waste the attention of their peers and your customers/prospects at the drop of a hat. Every interaction comes with a cost. Not in cash money, but in something worth even more: the attention of the person you’re interacting with. Waste it—with spam, with a worthless offer, with a lack of preparation, and yes, with nervous dissembling, then you are unlikely to get another chance.

When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.