This morning, I made a todo list. It was a very long, cumbersome list, but this marks a major advance in my life. For the past couple of weeks, I've been only dealing with whatever emergency was right in front of my face. It was impossible to think beyond that immediate moment. 

One of the many crises that happened yesterday was dealing my father's textbook publisher.

My dad is the editor of a popular political science textbook. It's in its 20th edition or something. He and his co-editor pull together pro and con articles on hot button political topics, such as gay marriage or gun control. They edit the articles down to a manageable length, and then write introductions to the topics to guide classroom conversation. 

He started off with a small fish publisher in the 1980s, which was bought out by a medium fish publisher, and then the medium fish publisher was bought out by a shark fish later in the 1990s. Well, it appears that this Big Shark Publisher is flapping around in shallow waters now. 

His editor sent him a long e-mail with requests for technical work. She wanted him to scan these articles with his $50 copier/scanner, merge the files into one document, and then convert it from a .jpeg file to a .pdf file. My dad is 75 and never really mastered the concept of copying a file to a disk. 

So, I drove over there and worked with him for a couple of hours. Then I got huffy and decided that this was a bad use of my his time. I told him to tell his editor to do it herself. That's why God invented underpaid editorial assistants. But my dad told me that the Big Shark Publisher has fired all of its editorial assistants and so they are making the authors do all the work. In fact, it had already moved its operations out of New York City and to Iowa, where costs are cheaper. Pierson, another textbook publisher around here, is moving to North Carolina for the cheaper costs, too. 

Why are textbook publishers having such a hard time? My guess is that most students aren't paying full price for textbooks anymore and are instead buying used books through Amazon and other online sites. They were too greedy, so that spawned a huge used book market. Also, the quality of these textbooks have declined so greatly that professors are using their own course packs. 

After we kindly told his editor to go stuff it, I went home to meet the next crisis. At some point, I would love to sit quietly and read a book. But until then, I have to locate the box with the aspirin.