I was sitting here facing yet another box of JW books. Most of them were older books but 3 were those new paperbacks they are putting out.
So as I'm sitting there tearing these sad excuses for doctrine I was wondering why the society would change their format. After all, they have been printing their books for eons and they are so easily recognizable. What reason would there be to change that - well besides the $$$ they save in printing. (like they really need to save money ciz they are so poor.
That's when the lightbulb went on.
JWs are pretty good at building large libraries in their homes of all the WT books. They don't throw them away. They line the walls with them. They cart them off to book studies and to "the book study". They get underlined and written in and saved. Sometimes the book study even repeats a study of the same book.
Well I know when I had to study a book the second time I saw no reason to buy a new one when I had a perfectly good one in my library that I could use again. We won't mention the number of times the books differed and no one wondered why the editions were different. We just went with the newer one without question. And those older bound books lasted a very long time.
Well I have this sneaking suspicion that those new paper covered books don't last nearly as long as the hard cover. So when a book is restudied people pretty much have to buy a new one.
There are two benefits to the WTS of this.
- people have to keep buying the same book because the old one fell apart = increased $ale$
- people will be less likely to notice the changes made from one edition to the next = more control over what they teach and a greater ability to hide their constant revisions