High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

I came to America poor, and went straight to a public university, on scholarship and no money to even pay for food (grad seminars and special events with free sandwiches and pizza is how I learned about things like quaternions as an undergrad). But as an eastern European hacker, i had a complete disregard of copyright, I also grew up in the 90s when hacker ethos included strong anti-authoritarian elements. No way I was going to pay those ridiculous book prices.<p>So first thing I did was setup a DC server (direct connect, early 2000s p2p sharing protocol) with a friendly grad student on university infrastructure, where we shared books, encouraged other students to upload books, we also built a dyi book scanner (there&#x27;s one popular design that comes up first on google). the bookscanner at some point had a near 24&#x2F;7 utilization, and people were coordinating time slots by dc messages. the room with the scanner (which is also where the DC server was) turned into a kind of unix room&#x2F;hackerspace, because there was always somebody there working on something only vaguely related to university courses as such.<p>reminiscing on things like that always makes me realize just how much hacker culture has changed, to a significant extent as a result of societal pressure. I was extremely lucky, because when the handful of us got inevitably discovered, what followed was a series of meetings with department dean and university heads, lots of stern talking, which basically ended after they were convinced that they put sufficient fear of god in us. I&#x27;m particularly grateful to one networking and os professor who showed up to every single one of those meetings to advocate on our behalf. said professor had a significant contribution to computing in general, was strong supporter of old school hacker ethos, and is just all around great guy.<p>only a few years later aaronsw was thrown to the wolves by the cowards and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) at MIT over his JSTOR downloads, which in my personal perception of history was the end of this kind of &quot;oh captain my captain&quot; university hacker culture.

Here&#x27;s a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.<p>It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market.<p>The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a product(education via tuition) and choices are made for you(textbook selection) that you have to pay for in order to pass the class(see the realization of tuition). That&#x27;s fundamentally broken market mechanics.<p>The folks in charge of making the market decision(which textbook to use) should be the same ones paying for it. We have a term for this pattern - moral hazard, and we shouldn&#x27;t be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.

It’s so much worse than you think.<p>Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore.<p>Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason.<p>When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearson representative complained and I was given a talking to by the graduate student dean about consistency or some such nonsense. Eventually I would be reassigned to teach classes that didn’t involve digital components.<p>We called it the textbook industrial complex.

I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them. Isn’t it interesting how little effort has been invested in mitigating the runaway cost of higher education? That we enabled college administrators to turn up the cost dial without speed bumps? No wonder why young people have become cynical: we exploit them at every turn.

Virginia Military Institute&#x27;s math department decided they&#x27;d solve it by just writing their own open source books:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vmi.edu&#x2F;academics&#x2F;departments&#x2F;applied-mathematics&#x2F;affordable-textbooks-apex&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vmi.edu&#x2F;academics&#x2F;departments&#x2F;applied-mathematic...</a><p>My wife is a professor there and wrote their APEX precalculus book several years ago (why precalculus is needed for college students is another matter). The print price was raised this year but is still well under $20. I think I paid around $350 in 2005 for the text we used for 1205&#x2F;1206 at VT.<p>VMI also does outreach to help other schools adopt their books and transition from whatever they&#x27;d been using. Excellent use of public funds IMO.

I studied law for a few years in Denmark and I remember the insane amount of money required to purchase all the books on the curriculum<p>Most of them were written by the professors who taught the course and every year or two, they&#x27;d reshuffle the contents of the book to make it harder for students to follow the course by purchasing used copies from the previous year<p>Most of the time only a small part of the books were actually part of the curriculum. It wasn&#x27;t unusual to spend $100-$200 for a 700 page book only to later realise only 50 pages from it would actually be part of the curriculum. It seemed to me the page count had only been boosted to inflate the sticker price<p>I can understand why students turn to pirated copies when they realise they&#x27;re just viewed as cash cows by the teaching staff

Almost everything in North America is criminally priced with almost zero regulations, and all political parties are responsible for that: wanna buy a house, enjoy your 70y mortgage, wanna study, enjoy your student loans and expensive textbooks, oh you actually got sick, how rude?? Pay a hefty price or enjoy your 10hrs waiting time in the ER, Restaurants?! Pfft, pay the inflated prices for garbage food and don’t forget the 15%tip and credit card costs is also on you!! Gas is expensive? Yeah sorry despite the trillions we didn’t invest much in public transportation or bike&#x2F;walking infrastructure. And so on.

DRM is also frustrating for textbooks. I’m fine buying books, I have a “trophy case” in my office of unopened books because I like holding onto physical copies and supporting the creation of books that I find valuable.<p>But I don’t want to lug around 40lbs of paper everywhere I go. So I get a DRMless pdf copy of the book too.<p>I’d get the OReily subscription in a heartbeat if I could read it on the device of my choosing. But I can’t so I don’t.<p>I want to download the ebook to the ereader of my choice (ReMarkable) where I have instant access to my entire library, the ability to markup the document without defacing it (notes are separate layers), and the ability to add blank pages for notes between the real pages (this will damage the binding of a real book).<p>Books are objectively inferior for studying unless you need to rapidly flip between pages. And I’m going to optimize for my own time and efficiency every time.

As a recent grad, I can speak on this a bit:<p>My biggest problem with the current textbook industry (among many) is that each textbook manufacturer uses their own proprietary format for reading the books and doing assignments. Wiley and Sons uses WileyPlus which, in its original incarnation, used Flash until <i>the very last day</i> Flash was officially supported. Don&#x27;t want a potential security hole installed onto your laptop? Too bad, transfer to a different school because this one has been bought out by Wiley and Sons. And the interface was absolutely horrid. If you were doing division in their math website and entered a &quot;&#x2F;&quot;, they never set up the Javascript to state you were typing in a textbox so Firefox would open the &quot;search this page&quot; prompt.<p>This system made doing my homework more frustrating, not less. I dreaded doing math homework every day from age 16-20, not because I didn&#x27;t want to learn, but because I was constantly fighting WileyPlus&#x27; &quot;quirks&quot; instead of just doing the math.<p>All of these websites, not WileyPlus alone, also have horrible uptime. There were often times I had pressing homework to do and would be met with a &quot;Servers are down for maintenence&quot; screen. Since the textbook publishers cut predatory deals with the universities, professors are completely unable to switch to another publisher if these availability problems get out of hand. This leads to worse education outcomes, frustration with the professors who are constantly wrestling with the website, and students being forced to take out predatory loans to pay for these horrible books.<p>I do not miss college.

When I was in school, if we could find a way to take a course without buying a full price book we would. Piracy was a no brainer — it opened doors to all kinds of learning. I’m hugely thankful to the cracking teams that made some textbooks free and helped me learn Photoshop for $0 as a student.

It must have been &quot;acceptable&quot; for a couple of decades. When I was in Uni. almost 20 years ago, we&#x27;d all share scanned books between us. Don&#x27;t think I ever heard &quot;Oh, no thanks - that&#x27;s illegal&quot;

Culprits are always the instructors&#x2F;professors who teach courses. Aren&#x27;t they happy with their salaries? How much royalty do these instructors get from selling $200 textbook to their students? These professors should be ashamed of themselves in involving this scammy behavior, while at the same time these unethical&#x2F;immoral professors ask their students to sign honor code.

Textbook prices are so high that they create the impression among students that the publishers are stealing from them. Copyright provides publishers with a legal monopoly, which they exploit to increase prices. Whether we like it or not, piracy disrupts this monopoly.<p>Given years of abuse, the customer base that purchases textbooks has no patience for moral grandstanding. &#x27;Lower prices or die&#x27; should be the message to publishers.

Professors and textbook companies are ripping students off. They are immorally trying to suck each student dry with exorbitant prices. I think pirated textbooks is 100% fair play and I support it 100%.<p>Back in the 90s, copy shops across from the university would have entire books photocopied, and we could get them for $20 instead of $150. Some of the international students would go back home to Hong Kong or India for the summer and take orders on next year&#x27;s books, because they were much cheaper in Asia. This is a racket that has been going on for decades but only got exponentially worse these days, and I completely support starving these robber barons of any revenue.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;court-sentences-man-for-selling-pirated-textbook-pdfs-230510&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;court-sentences-man-for-selling-pir...</a><p>[While this type of activity is clearly illegal, the sentence also has an ironic twist. A quick calculation shows that the fine and confiscated money amount to less than $20 per pirated textbook, meaning that buying them legally would probably have been more expensive.]

Won’t things like blanket student loan forgiveness or very cheap student loans make such moral hazards even worse? Publishers, college administrators, football coaches, etc. will try to extract as much as possible from the free student loans provided by the government.

There was a mathematics professor in Canada who wrote what became the standard calculus textbooks used in universities here (the violin ones). Anyways, one day a local paper did a little showcase of the house that textbooks paid for and now that I&#x27;m trying to dig up a reference to that article, I find it has its own Wikipedia page!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Integral_House" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Integral_House</a><p>Suffice to say, I, nor anyone else, should not feel bad about pirating that series of books.

I was in Germany as an exchange student (in 2012). In the library, they had copying machines that photographed from top and processed the images so they looked like perfect scans. You would just go there with a book and USB drive, turn pages for a while and then you had a copy of that book. Needless to say that we distributed the copies. So it was only necessary when we couldn’t find the exact version. The libraries usually had several copies books.<p>For some courses, professors also just uploaded PDFs of entire books in the learning platform.<p>There was also an on-campus shop where you could buy the printed slides for an entire course for a few Euros. I still have one of them for nostalgic reasons because I was intensely studying the math in there. By the way it was beautifully done by the professor&#x27;s team in LaTeX.

States should mandate that public universities use open textbooks. Federal government should make open textbooks, open journals, and FRAND licensing of patents mandatory as a condition of subsidies and other largesse like student loan guarantees.

In engineering school in the 1990s, a Taiwanese student in our school would order all the books in Taiwan and then their mom would ship a huge box to us in Canada. It costs 50% less than buying the same books in Canada.<p>Textbooks are a racket.

Basic ethical principles should make it acceptable.<p>We live in an age where you no longer need a printing press to manufacture and distribute books. And public universities already get enough of my tax dollars that they should be publishing the text books required for their clases. For free. Public funding equals public availability and ownership.<p>When a university demands a $300 book from some private publisher, it amounts to fraud and all involved should be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted of federal felonies. Stop the grift.<p>What the fuck are we paying professors for, if not to write the written materials they deem requirements to learn the curriculum they teach? Get to work motherfuckers.

When I was a student, there were several alternatives to just photocopying the entire textbook (back then you couldn&#x27;t download scanned versions). The university had a library with usually at least 5-10 copies of all the textbooks required by the courses, and 1-2 copies of books that were tangentially related to the courses. For the books expected to be in-demand because they were used by courses, usually the bulk of them weren&#x27;t available to borrow, so they were in the library at all times. You could use it during the day, and take it to a study area to read and summarise the parts that mattered to you (the best way to learn), or photocopy parts if you were short for time.<p>There was also a second hand bookshop, where you could buy books for about 25% of the original price and usually sell them back to the bookshop for about 20% of the price at the end of the year, so they just got restocked most years and sold to the next batch of students needing it. This system only broke down when the course changed substantially, but in practice that was usually only about 1 of the 10+ modules each year.<p>In my 3 year course, I probably read about 100 relevant books cover to cover, bought maybe 3 full price because I knew I&#x27;d want to keep them for longer than the course, and kept 2 of the second hand books rather than selling them back.<p>Back then, I also had friends studying law, and they had to pay a fee at the start of each year, but would receive a pack each term that was several inches thick of photocopied case material. Presumably that was because they weren&#x27;t predominantly reading to learn and internalise the material, but they needed to constantly quote specific sections at multiple points during their assignments, and so pretty much everybody needed the same material at the same time. But in that case, the university had permission to duplicate the necessary material.

I’ve had professors share PDFs of copyrighted textbooks with the class. I doubt this was legally valid in any way.<p>I personally love to buy textbooks because I think a physical book is easier to retain. Printing and binding a PDF at Fedex is usually a similar cost, and I’d rather have the nice physical copy decorate my bookshelf, like a hard-won trophy.<p>I would make the argument that textbooks should cost more than novels because I can read a novel at a page per minute or two, but a textbook is probably more like a page per 30-60 (on average). Then again, many Dover books cost around the same price as novels.<p>That being said, you might need to consult 3 or 4 different textbooks for a course, and on a student’s budget, this is absurd. Anybody that doesn’t have parents in the upper middle class and beyond will suffer. Science is an engine of social mobility for the intellectually gifted and nobody should feel bad for pirating textbooks. I think, like pirating journal articles, the only people that disagree with you are publishing companies.

If educational institutions had any morality or integrity, they would use their large staff and student body to write public domain textbooks. Undergrad textbooks do not contain any new or novel information.

We had paperback editions which were a fraction of the cost of the US editions.<p>Some years ago, to prevent US students from using these versions, most publishers changed the page numbering, some content and the problem sets.

When I taught algorithms, I had 2 or 3 textbooks students could buy if they really wanted them, but there was no required textbook. I provided students with detailed slides and lectures notes covering the course material. I would try to find a handful of websites and videos I had vetted covering the topics using the same terminology as we used in class, or with a note explaining the difference.<p>Not only did it mean students were not stuck with a surprise bill for a book they&#x27;d rarely use, but it also meant I had more freedom to teach what and how I wanted. Since I was teaching it with a focus on being a day-to-day developer, I put in my own section on await&#x2F;async style coding and optimizing chains of dependent asynchronous calls. It was one of my favorite sections as it was exactly the sort of thing I would actually do in my job.

The professor for the data compression class I took encouraged us to photocopy the pages from the textbook that we needed for the week. Turned out that he was the author and was very apologetic about the price of the textbook though he had no real control over it.

I support this kind of piracy. If society thinks education for kids is important, they should make it easy for kids to get that education.

One of my early tech jobs was working for a startup that created dynamic&#x2F;randomized questions to go on a CD stuck in the back of text books. The same tech was used to create randomized online tests to go with the textbooks. Our biggest customer was Pearson, and once I realized the impact on students I was pissed. Completely eliminated sharing of books, and even simple things like group solving of problems since each student had unique problem sets.<p>Of course the same company fired me when I was fighting cancer, and then was acquired by Wimba. Oh and if T. Mack Brown reads this site, you can kiss my ass...

It&#x27;s really not like most people really consider piracy a crime anyway. Most people have pirated something at least once, it&#x27;s basically a ubiquitous &#x27;crime&#x27;. The war on copying has failed.

Meta question - why do we need the latest version of a text book every year. None of the undergraduate fundamental subjects change every year. It’s a racket - problems and some content are modified a bit and moved around making last year’s text book obsolete for page numbers and problem numbers. There really ought to be a set of 100 or so STEM textbooks that cover all the basics and are open source made available freely with source globally. All it will take is one billionaire to decide they want to do this and buy out rights or commision new content.

Any price is too much. 99% of the time 99% of people in university are not learning anything cutting edge, they&#x27;re learning old things to prepare them to learn new things. There are plenty of works out of copyright (or that never were in copyright) that can be used themselves, or that could be stitched together to create complete courses.<p>This seems like a basic thing that governments should be doing, but governments never do anything that would &quot;crowd out&quot; rent-seekers, because they&#x27;re the servants of rent-seekers.<p>Maybe, if you&#x27;re a multi-billionaire, use one of those billions to put together enough unencumbered material to fill a wide-ranging university program? Or if you&#x27;re a university, while you&#x27;re committing to open-access, make a commitment to your students that all of the materials that they&#x27;ll need will be available freely, on the net, if at all possible? So many billions sloshing around, so many people claiming the problem is so complicated, when it looks very simple. It&#x27;s as manufactured a problem as the idea that taxes are so complicated that the IRS can&#x27;t figure them out.<p>edit: and succinctly,<p>&gt; I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36186362" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36186362</a>

I propose that students should write the textbooks and pass them on to the next class, who in turn edits and writes more of the same textbook. Using a tool like a Wiki that keeps complete history of every addition, edit, delete to the content of the teaching material. And, of course, with citations and references.<p>Start with the old textbooks in the school library and teachers editions and give writing assignments for new original writing that becomes the teaching material for the current class and future classes.

It&#x27;s been a little over two decades since I first attended university, but I recall that very few of the courses had a textbook. The lecturer wrote notes, be it on paper to hand out or on the boards to be copied and annotated. Now and then a reference was made to a textbook for further reading or for some specific proof or some such, but in no way was any course taught from a textbook in such a way that you simply needed the textbook. This was at a university in London, reading Physics.<p>I wonder how unusual (or not) that is? Is the heavy textbook emphasis a US thing, or is it more common?<p>(About a decade later I read Maths with the Open University, which is basically the student on their own for six years learning some trick mathematics; a couple of those modules definitely taught from textbooks, although by no means all of them; some of them again simply provided notes and explanations and problem sheets generated by the university)

Textboox pricing issues seem to be so country&#x2F;subject specific.<p>UK, Computer Science, 10-14 years ago. I was given 5 core textbooks on day 1 of my course – Java, C, 2x Maths, Communications. Probably about £200 worth. After that there were no required books. There were recommended books, of which the university library had copies of all of them with policies that meant they were always available to read but couldn&#x27;t be loaned out because they were core material. On top of that there were subject reading material that no one used and made no difference. I never once heard of a textbook being part of an assessment - like using questions in the book.<p>I seemed to have been very lucky, both CS often requiring fewer textbooks and the UK not having quite the same culture of exploitative companies. But it does illustrate how unnecessary the process is. Maybe students need to strike on buying textbooks.

I&#x27;m surprised that will how many people and institutions should be interested, there aren&#x27;t more textbooks with a Creative Commons license. For anything non-specialized in a mature field, it doesn&#x27;t make sense to have so many equivalent options all priced at $150. Calculus is calculus.

There is one company in this sector that is innovating on price, Perlego. They use a Netflix-style model where you pay one monthly fee and can access all of the textbooks in their catalog. At roughly $18&#x2F;mo, it is significantly cheaper than buying&#x2F;renting individual textbooks if 2 or more or your textbooks are in their catalog.<p>They’re not as well-known as redshelf or vitalsource, but their content largely overlaps. I only became aware of them because they approached my startup about licensing our technology, but since then I’ve been using their platform to read various nonfiction books (they have about a million titles between textbooks and nonfiction).<p>I think they have a good shot at changing how students pay for books, and as their library grows their model will become even more attractive to students.

Copying textbooks is explicitly legal in India as part of case law, as &quot;fair dealing&quot;. This was decided in 2016 and involved Oxford University Press and Cambridge University press, so the opponents were pretty powerful overall.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehindu.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;cities&#x2F;Delhi&#x2F;University-copying-books-for-teaching-is-not-copyright-violation-Delhi-HC&#x2F;article14984190.ece" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehindu.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;cities&#x2F;Delhi&#x2F;University-copyin...</a><p>Wiki article because the hindu is paywalled: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_of_Oxford_v._Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...</a>

Guess what? You do not need to buy textbooks if you have a smart professor that cares and isn&#x27;t into the racket.<p>You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!

We are gate keeping access to knowledge&#x2F;education too much, I wonder if this has any effect on the rate at which a society evolves, how many smart minds didn&#x27;t make it due to lack of funds, perhaps one of them could have revolutionized the battery tech?

Forgive my ignorance: what do student do with all these books? I did my U&#x2F;G &amp; Masters in Physics in Exeter UK. We used only 1 actual textbook (University Physics by Young and Freedman, about 45USD new). I bought 1 more by choice (Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Mary Boas) because I needed some help there and the lecturer was weak. But all the actual information I needed was covered in lectures, tutorials etc. Assignments were class specific and produced by lecturers. How does the US system actually use all these books?

Textbook prices in North America are just plain criminal. The racket is exacerbated by the requirement by profs to always be on the latest edition, even though there is no material change in content. It is a disgrace.

A few of the best profs at my school had their own &quot;textbook&quot; that was basically custom-written and only covered the material covered in their course. 40-60 pages, $20-30, and 100% relevant

Digital homework systems, licenses, and school and professor mandates asides, I wonder how much of the actual <i>content</i> in textbooks is freely available on Wikipedia right now.

Some books I pay for, some books I pirate, some books I do both because sometimes it&#x27;s handy to have a pdf.<p>But I mainly pay for books because it tends to be cheaper than printing them myself.<p>If I were born as a westerner with my mom and dad being there always to catch me if I fall I would always pay for knowledge, sure. But I pretty much feel entitled to free knowledge. I will happily pirate a 200 eur math textbook, 200 eur for me is a lot more than for your average westerner.

In college, I used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;used.addall.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;used.addall.com</a> and one semester got all my books down to $35 with older editions. This only worked because people in class would share photocopies of the problem sets from the new editions. A couple of cool professors would also give exercise numbers for the last few editions; they had previously taught the class with those editions, anyway.

Back when I was in uni all the students bought books, sometimes second hand or indian versions or pirated them at copy shops.<p>Meanwhile me and a few friends got access to all the books for free by hanging out in the library every day. It&#x27;s not something that would scale to everyone but I always found it amusing. Ended up buying a total or 4 books for a 5 year EECS course, and that&#x27;s because I wanted those as keepsakes, for nostalgia reasons.

When I was at university, I bought about 300€ worth of textbooks. In total, for the whole 5+ years. Math books we used were about 30-40€ each, the IT books maybe up to 50€. More often than not you didn&#x27;t need any book at all since the professor put up his lecture notes as PDF or you could just copy it in the library from his handwritten notes (that was back in the early 2000s where the Internet was not quite as it is now)

Super confused by stories like this. I went to university in Germany and any course materials we needed were provided to us as pdfs. They also had a service where you could print it out on a bunch of copy paper if you wanted a bit more tangible form, for basically the cost of paper and toner. My entire tuition likely cost less than American students waste on books. Don&#x27;t you want people to learn?

The best college prof I had used scientific article printouts as our text. She provided excellent notes to present the material.

One friend I knew in college did the math and realized he could buy a really nice SLR and tripod for the cost of his textbooks one semester. He bought the camera, tripod, and books. Then he spent an evening each semester photographing all the pages of all the books, then returned all of the books.

One of my relatives attends a public university that rents textbooks to students. At the end of the year they&#x27;re returned. If a new edition comes out, the university eats the cost. As I understand it, some of the books are available as downloads, and in other cases teachers accept the use of old editions.

I dislike the wording of this title.<p>It’s not about being “acceptable” - it’s about it being _necessary_ to afford. Sure, maybe they could go hungry for a few weeks… but this is such a predatory practice that preys on the psychology of student loans. “I’m already paying 60k for tuition… what’s another $800 for 4 books.”

Serious question.<p>Anybody actually keep and use their old textbooks?<p>Way back in the day, I only ever kept an algorithms book and used it once a never.

For the business operations and analytics courses I teach, many of the available textbooks are outdated or out of touch with industry. Thankfully, our library has a license to subscription services like O’Reilly Media, which gives students “free” access to their books and learning platform.

I know an instructor who&#x27;d tell his students &quot;I wrote a book for this course, and you can buy a hardcopy if you want, but there&#x27;s a PDF floating around on the Internet if you don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s worth buying.&quot;

ChatGPT has made this argument obsolete. First, ChatGPT can generate textbooks that can not be copyrighted. Second, ChatGPT makes textbooks obsolete by replacing one-size-fits-all text with custom answers to questions.<p>Source: I&#x27;m a teacher.

I always bought used books from previous students from the semester before me, and then sold them after I was done.<p>The cost in the end was pretty miniscule as the loss in value of a book across 1 semester was pretty tiny.

Im glad HN is on the same page about piracy: it’s not stealing if you still have the thing I’ve “taken” from you. If only everyone was consistent enough to apply that logic to AI.

I used to buy international paperback editions cheaply on these online mom and pop businesses. Saved like 50-75% on most titles. Hope students are still able to do this?

I had many courses where I was told to buy a high priced textbook, coincidentally authored by the professor, which was never even referenced or used.

Tell a student not to pirate textbooks due to copyright while teaching them that chatGPT scans almost all available knowledge for free ...

No one should feel the least bit guilty for copying. It’s not unethical. If it’s a problem, just add the price of the book to the course.

We&#x27;d just buy one copy and everyone would get a photocopy or (later, when tech was better) scan.

The only useful textbook I had in college was the book algorithms, which was a $20 paperback.<p>Price to value was solid.

Who needs textbooks when Chatgpt, YT, open course, khan academy, gives u education for cheap?

It is a business between publishers and universities. There is no mystery here.

It’s not piracy when you’re pirating from a pirate

Besides bleak job market, horrible healthcare, being potential homeless due to skyhigh housing cost, stark contrast to the boomer&#x27;s easy life, the more extreme weathers and the climate change, textbook is probably an afterthought. It&#x27;s not even in top 10 things to worry about

It&#x27;s hardly news that most people find it easy to justify all kinds of lying, cheating, and stealing to themselves. To be charitable, young people are usually too oblivious&#x2F;ignorant to fully appreciate why what they are doing is wrong, and there is also a ton of peer pressure to steal and cheat.