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New friends on Twitter February 22, 2009

Posted by Eugene Aronsky in : Twitter friends , 1 comment so far

Lately I have been spending much time on Twitter,  and I have been making many new friends. Tweet me @wecomparebooks.

I’d like to take this time to tell you about the blogs of a few of the friends I’ve recently made.

Independent beginnings (http://independentbeginnings.blogspot.com) is a very cool blog that deals with personal finance issues related to students. This blog has a ton of great advice and I recommend that all students who want to save money in college check it out.

Another really cool blog that I’ve discovered is www.thecheapchica.net, this is a blog that is dedicated to everyone who is looking to find high fashion on the web at a reasonable price.

I recently met a very nice and gifted teacher on Twitter, his name is Paul Blankenship, (Twitter ID @instruisto).  If you are interested in social studies check out Paul’s site, http://www.paulblankenship.com/

I recently made a new friend on Twitter, “Dellgirl”. She is a retired teacher, an author and a blogger.  I found her blog to be very interesting, and I really like much of the advice she gives.

You can find her blog at
At The Starting Gate/

OK, so it’s a recession and you are a recent college grad, or you just got laid-off, or you lost your job b/c your sector was eliminated, or… what do you do now? February 22, 2009

Posted by Eugene Aronsky in : Eugene Aronsky, Great Depression, We Compare Books, colleges, deflation, depression, economy, education, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, founders, recession , add a comment

Lately, as the economy continues to decline I have seen more and more of this, my friends, and friends of friends, and pretty much everyone else I went to college with who managed to get a job post graduation are now facing layoffs.  These are all people with a graduate education, but given that the economy is loosing half a million jobs a month, and last hired makes you the first to get laid off recent grads (within 2 years of graduation) are being hit hard.  The bright side in all this is that having a college education still makes you far less likely to be unemployed (unless of course you are in the finance, or real estate industry). The reality is, and this is something that has surprised me, a number of my friends who have gotten laid off managed to find new jobs within a few weeks, and a few even got a raise!  And what’s more, some sectors seem to be far less susceptible to the downturn we are having, and a few sectors such as parts of IT, online development, e-commerce are still expanding and are still hiring. So there is some cause to be optimistic!

So the question you might ask is, what is there to do for the rest of us? What can one do if they just graduated from college and have no experience, or what can a person who just lost a job in an industry facing a severe downturn do? The answer is simple! Well OK, not simple, and not easy, but few things worth doing in life really are…

This is probably the best time in many years to start a business, to be an entrepreneur, to follow your dreams, to build or create something new.  Some of the bluest of the blue chip companies we know today were founded during the Great depression, (Boeing being one). Others, such as Coca-Cola took advantage of the depression to codify their brand in the minds of Americans.  What is more, the current recession seems to have significant other advantages for those of us looking to start a business, one being that the barrier to entry, to many businesses has disappeared.  Years ago, if I wanted to start a newspaper I would need significant resources, today I can start a blog for free. If I wanted to produce documentaries, I had to have a studio; today I can do it with a digital camera and youtube. If I wanted to teach anything I had to have some type of resources to get started- today I can use my webcam to create lectures on any subject, from philosophy, and teaching Chinese, to quantum physics, and I can promote these lectures through video sharing sites and my blog, once there is a following for my lectures I can institute a small fee for the more advanced lectures (while continuing to provide the beginners lectures for free).  I can open up a store, or sell widgets online for very little, if any start up cost, and given that we are all looking for ways to save money more and more of us are turning to the internet to purchase our widgets.  The possibilities are really endless, restricted only by your interests, and your creativity.

The point I am trying to make is that there is more than one way to look at this recession, one way is to look at it as years lost, another is to look at it as an opportunity to make a name for yourself, or to grow a business, and this way when we come out of this recession you will be in a stronger position.

This is great advice for students and those with few responsibilities, and I understand that for many of us we need to have money to pay for the kids’ new clothes, and for the mortgage. So to those of us out there with responsibilities, my advice is this, continue networking, continue looking for a job, sending resumes… but instead of doing that for 8 hours a day, do it for 6 hours and spend the other 2 hours on some of the other ideas that you might have.

Thoughts from the editor – Is our university system irreparably broken? February 19, 2009

Posted by Eugene Aronsky in : Eugene Aronsky, We Compare Books, colleges, education, founders, letter from editor , 2comments

First of all, please allow me to apologize for not writing on this blog as often as I perhaps should, I have been too preoccupied trying to absorb the constantly changing economic environment, and its impact on students. Anyways, this is a new feature on this blog, “thoughts from the editor”, where I will pontificate on things going on in the world, and will try to focus the conversation on the effect that these events have on students.

In recent months, as the economy has continued to move in the direction that birds move for winter (south) and as unemployment has continued to rise, resulting in many of my friends becoming unemployed I have been struck with the failure of our college system to train students for a job in the “post Facebook world”.  This “failure” as I see it is two-fold, one, we are not taught the right skills, creativity is not encouraged or valued, and two, having graduated from college with $100k in debt many of us must spend the next two decades repaying banks for our education (that is, assuming we are able to repay them ever)

Our college system was designed during an industrial era, an era when very few were able to go to college- most going to work straight out of high school, and an era when the skills we were taught were not only applicable, but would aid us in our chosen career. Additionally, since a college degree meant something, we were able to get good paying jobs and had the shot of living good lives, not being indebted to banks for our education.  Today this is no longer the case. True, you can still get a scientific education, and graduate having an expectation of a good salary, but most of us these days are not choosing to study engineering, or biology, but are rather choosing to get degrees in English, literature, or business, and with such degrees, given our real earning potential it is impossible for us to even hope of one day being free from the yolk of students loans.  There are multiple other issues that we can discuss regarding the brokenness of higher education with extent to cost, but having scratched the surface of this issue I feel that I ought to move on.

The second issue I would like to talk about stems from the quality of our education, the “quality” I speak of is a constant and remains low, whether one is attending Harvard, or a local community college.  Our colleges do not teach us the skills we need, and in fact, often fight against the integration of modernity into the university setting.  Here I would like to refer to a recent experience of mine. My university requires all students to have completed an internship for credit prior to graduation, and they help students obtain said internships through the career center.  Knowing this I approached the career center on behalf of We Compare Books wanting to post an internship, I completed the required forms, wrote a description… having finished ands submitted my application I was told that my application was declined and could not be posted because the position I posted was telecommuting. Of course, I was given other reasons, but I was struck with the sense that the primary reason that my application was turned away is because I did not want to require my interns to go to an office to work.  Having spoken with a representative at the career center I was struck by the fact that the career center either did not understand, or was unwilling to understand the way that e-commerce operated, and the role that e-commerce plays in today’s world- this is a reality that applies to the career centers of most universities.

The next example of how today’s colleges are broken is one that I’ve seen time and again throughout my academic career.  During many of the business/communication classes I’ve taken I have been required to design everything from a business plan for a fictitious business to a website, but I was never taught, indeed I was never encouraged to pursue these to reality. Whenever we designed websites we were never told to post them on the web, and whenever we made business or marketing plans we were not encouraged to make them a reality.  Indeed, we were discouraged from using the same business plan idea in our marketing plan… and lastly, the word “entrepreneur” never emerged from any professors lips, and might had been viewed as blasphemy if it had.  (I learned more about starting a business from old sitcoms than I ever did from any business course I have taken).  Indeed, greatness and innovation in the past 20 years has accelerated away from academia and into the minds of college drop-outs, who grow tired of mediocrity and go on to greatness.

The point that I am trying to make is that the college system is broken because it does not foster creativity, and as a reward for our attendance over burdens us with debt.  Today, many colleges unfortunately are no longer institutions of learning, but are businesses, collecting money, with utter disregard for the stakeholders (the students).

Our society and books – are we addicted to books? February 11, 2009

Posted by Eugene Aronsky in : Eugene Aronsky, We Compare Books, books, e-books, economy, founders, new books, reading, textbooks, used books , add a comment

We live in a society where the value of the written word has steadily eroded in recent decades.  This erosion can be seen in a number of ways, starting with the rise of text messaging and instant messages as a form of communication in which shortening words is the norm, to the steady decline of basic formality.  Not only are most freshman college students incapable of spelling, but many have to be taught standard ways to address one’s elders in a letter (or an email to a professor).  Given such a decline, combined with the increased time that most of us spend in front of digital media (TV’s, computer’s video games…) one might think that the book- that indispensable, tome that has helped to shape our society, would be in decline as well, yet the contradictory is true.

Our society is one that has elevated literacy as a human good, and has, as a consequence of this elevated books.  We all have bookshelves filled with volumes of hard cover books, some of these we have read, but many (either given to us as a gift, or bought by us in a fit of passion and desire to change ourselves) will stand there for years collecting dust without having a broken spine; indeed, we often collect books as a sign of our intellectual prowess.  What amazes me is that in our world- where abbreviations are steadily replacing many words, we still value the spoken word as an “end in itself”, so much so that we judge developing countries on the literacy rate of their population.  The HDI (human development index), an annual report that rates countries from most, to least developed, looking at nations’ standards of living, mentions the issue of literacy as a key indicator of a States’ development.

Talking about the cost of books, this too has changed, from the days where all books were affordable, to today, where the cost of some books (almost anything printed 50 years ago or more) has shrunk virtually to $0, with e-books being freely available online, to the costs of others skyrocketing to a point where one is almost required to take out a second mortgage to afford a few textbooks (this may sound funny, but I kid you not, the cost of many accounting or business textbooks is upwards of $200, and students are required to purchase 4-5 of these books a semester!)

It is my hope that with the increased use of technology, e-books and other media, such as We Compare Books, book prices will again shrink as publishers realize the un-sustainability of such increases and figure out other ways to profit from our addiction to books (perhaps using product placement in examples, If Jimmy buys a bottle of Coke for $… and a bottle of Pepsi costs…, but here I am of course joking).