Acceptable? How about necessary for most students. Books for a semester should not cost more than living on campus and a meal plan.
I had a girl break down crying in one of my classes after the prof said the $200 textbook was mandatory. She said she was living paycheque to paycheque and couldn’t afford it without skipping meals. We couldn’t even pirate it because it was the “Canadian edition” which had a completely different chapter format and layout.
That is to be expected when a new textbook costs more than $300, is forced to be single-use with nonsense download codes, has a new version yearly with no functional changes, and doesn’t benefit anybody.
12 years later and GabeN’s quote still applies. “Piracy is a service problem”
This whole thing is madness. Courses shouldn’t have hidden costs.
Open Textbooks is the future! Stay within law with above link.
Not much point, students don’t choose the textbooks.
If the teacher recommends these books, student would read them!
Teacher does not decide on the syllabus and book material for students. Government boards and institutions decide for schools.
I’m a student right now, and basically every single person I have talked to has pirated a textbook at least once. Everyone is sick of paying $200 for a textbook that the prof sometimes doesn’t even use.
This was true when i was in college over a decade ago. My Professors were largely sympathetic to students having to pay extortionate prices for textbooks and gave us resources wherever possible
I was in college pre 2006 and didn’t have the option to pirate books (that i knew of). If it was an option you’re damn right I would have done it. My books were easily $300+ for the quarter and I can’t imagine how much they are now.
Not only academic texts. Also darn ISO norms. Unfortunately those are pretty rare to find among the booty bobbing across the sea.
The instructors I had were notorious to pirate as well. They’d sell photo copied bundled “text books” from other textbooks as the required edition so they get part of the profit from the sale of the book and maybe include some pirated copy of a movie or some other materials they stole online.
When I studied in South America, our professors were very open about it. None of us could have afforded textbooks anyway (by a large margin), so usually, only the professors would have the original textbook and worked with the small photocopy business located on campus to scan the book once and print as many copies as the students needed. The copies were bundled properly and all. Same with any software, files or operating system.
