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A bookshelf filled with unread textbooks?

A new and highly entertaining survey from a company called Koofers Inc. delivers these grave tidings: 14 percent of textbooks purchased by college students are never cracked.

Koofers, an online company that champions “open and free access” to course materials, reviewed data collected from 76,757 course reviews submitted by its users. The company says it inserted a question about textbook use “after students raised concerns about unused textbooks.”

The response: one-third of students reported using their textbook “a lot,” 28 percent “a good amount,” 25 percent “a little” and 14 percent not at all. (A few said the question wasn’t applicable to their course, presumably for lack of a textbook.)

The company’s sobering conclusion: “The college textbook market is estimated to exceed $10 billion annually, so this data suggests that as much as $1.4 billion is being wasted every year through the sale of textbooks that students never use.”

But hey: even a shelf full of unread textbooks can impress.