Someone needs to think first: one more dumb idea

With the start of new school year, the BYU Bookstore is doing the usual fall cleaning of it's shelves. They're having their annual sale out on the sidewalks between the Wilkinson Student Center and the Library, trying to get rid of all of those extra copies of stuff that just isn't selling inside the bookstore. Sometimes there is a hidden gem at a fair price. More often there is a lot of stuff that is easy to overlook even with the hyped-up discount price tags.

Walking by the tables i noticed what just might be the best example of a dumb idea; a small book titled "How to Download Music From the Iternet". i should have stopped to take a real good look at the book, to see who was dumb enough to publish this book. the only person dumber than the publisher was the person who decided to purchase a copy for a college bookstore.

Even at BYU there were considerations to shut down Napster just because of the ammount of bandwidth that was being used by students pirating music. Here we are a good 6 years+ past the height of Napster and a good few years into the reign of the iTunes Music store, and someone thinks that downloading music needs to be explained, to college students. The book wasn't even much bigger than the original 30GB iPods, and i'm guessing that there was plenty of white space on the pages. How much novel information could they give anyone in such a small book? in any book? maybe the book was just a hard copy of the results from googling "download music". i can't even find the book in Amazon or with a Google search, to show how pathetic the little waste of paper looked.

Maybe i should have stopped and bought the book for a quarter or whatever fool price the book was marked down to. i'm always on the lookout for a lame selection to give away as a gag gift.