If you're in marketing or advertising... kill yourself.

• College textbooks will now feature advertisements.

Color me unsurprised:

Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television either cheap or free. But so far, the model hasn't spread to college textbooks — partly for fear that faculty would consider ads undignified. The upshot is that textbooks now cost students, according to various studies, about $900 per year.

Now, a small Minnesota startup is trying to shake up the status quo in the $6 billion college textbook industry. Freeload Press will offer more than 100 titles this fall — mostly for business courses — completely free. Students, or anyone else who fills out a five-minute survey, can download a PDF file of the book, which they can store on their hard drive and print.

Sigh... it was only a matter of time.

UPDATE, 8/16: No wonder the press is derided. As of this writing the blatant spelling error in the headline of the above article remains uncorrected. (Never heard of a texbook before. Are they made in Texas?) Now's the time to slap your forehead.

Future 2 future

• Plans are afoot to release literary classics as condensed text messages.

Somehow I doubt this will catch on, at least with the 0.001% of the world’s population that actually enjoys reading (you know, for fun). Basically it’s just Cliffs Notes for your cell phone, which is great if you’re a hung-over college freshman trying to scrape your way through an 8am Lit-101 class. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for the real thing, and I seriously doubt it will be.

• Bryan Curtis defends college journalists at Slate.

Man, I feel old. I can remember when microfiche was the only way to find my archived newspaper articles. Curtis’ point is that with the advent of digital publishing, collegiate journalists’ sloppiness can now dog them wherever they go... and what’s wrong with that? In my experience, it’s relatively easy for a writer to spit something out, but it’s sometimes harder to get an editor to take the time to help them shape it. The common delusion is that writers operate in a total vacuum, which is not even close to the truth, but having done newspaper and magazine work in the past, I can remember being amazed that some of the crap I wrote got published in the first place. Editors have just as much responsibility as writers to make sure what hits the page is as airtight as it can be. Too much editorial slack, and you get lazy, half-assed, unsubstantiated tripe that shouldn’t even have seen the light of day in the first place... in other words, you get Jayson Blair.

Anyway.