When you are performing a boondoggle, you generally had a reason or purpose in mind, and what you're doing right now is pointless towards that purpose.
For instance, let's say you wanted to improve the educational quality of a university and you build a new chemistry lab that costs a lot of money. You're about 80% of the way through when you realize that the lab is never going to help education if you can't attract competent professors. Oops. That's an example of a boondoggle.
So what word would we use for charging 'new' costs for textbooks containing 'old' data, with the only substantive changes being an updated graphic (updated as in: a photo of a law office taken in 2017 whereas the third edition featured a photo taken in 1992), and some reworded paragraphs-where ultimately the core academic content remains the same?
