High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Students
High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Students
New research published by the Rights Alliance shows that more than half of all students find it acceptable to use pirated books.
12 years later and GabeN's quote still applies. "Piracy is a service problem"
All hail GabeN
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.
Open Textbooks is the future! Stay within law with above link.
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.
Eh. I'm sure there's some of that going on, but if you're buying a course pack through the university book store, there's a pretty good chance you're just paying printing (it hard copy) and licensing fees.
A lot of university textbook publishers will sell the content of the books per chapter to university book stores.
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
Same for me, about a decade ago this was already a thriving piracy area. My professors were about 80/20. It may be because it's an art college, about 80% of the time they said a version or two behind would be fine, which a previous version loses all value when a new one comes out so you can get it cheap off amazon. 20% were hard asses that said you HAVE to have the newest version and you HAVE to get it before classes start and can't compromise with them. I can't imagine my rage if I would have had some of those new "pay $80 to access your math book & coursework that expires after the class" that were starting to happen.
This whole thing is madness. Courses shouldn't have hidden costs.
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.
First year is when they nab you. My first year I had ONE textbook cost over $200 by itself. I probably spend over $1000 my first year on textbooks. 2nd year I refused to buy a single one, and pirated them all
When I was in community college the teachers made homework / quizzes 30% of our grade. That homework was locked behind a pin code that could only be accessed by buying the textbook. Mess up on one test and that was an automatic failure (C's minimum to transfer). COVID came along and I dropped school altogether. Seems its only getting worse. Not sure if I even want to go back.
To make matters worse is since it was automated if the system wasn't configured correctly and marked correct answers incorrect, looking at your Pearson, you'd fail the test. All the instructor could do was unlock it so you could take it again, but that is really a moot point since it was an error in the design.
Even the community colleges are doing this?!
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.
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 happens in Latin America since forever. Welcome to the fold?
Not only academic texts. Also darn ISO norms. Unfortunately those are pretty rare to find among the booty bobbing across the sea.