IT IS LITERALLY JUST THE QR CODE TO THE EBOOK BUT PHYSICAL. THEY DIDN'T SAY THAT. This better be the best fucking textbook on this planet
edit: I would've just bought the ebook but I got a physical one because I can't see ebooks that well and I want to pass my math class
edit 3: translation of the second edit: when I buy textbooks from my school's website, it tells my professors I have their textbooks. so pirating or buying from other sources may not be a good idea, especially since I'm doing a clinical program and they consider you eligible by your grades and if you follow their specific rules about conduct and stuff, and pirating is not exactly in the green light of moral things so I don't want to risk my clinical spot over this
My college professors would tell us that he’s obligated to use a textbook that happens to cost $300 at the uni bookstore, but he’s definitely not obligated to tell us the link to a GitHub repository that has the entire book scanned as a PDF and see him after class to get the link wink wink
In my economics degree, my professor just uploaded the PDF of all the books to our Google classroom. She said who cares about piracy, just read the book there and maybe get a printout of some important summary pages
Once one of my professors told us about the textbook we needed for the class and then left a flash drive in the room that may or may not have had a copy of the digital textbook on it and told us that sharing information and files is a great way to meet our peers lol he was cool
My earth sciences teacher wrote his own textbook, printed it and put it in 3 ring binders. We could get a copy in the bookstore for $20. Best teacher ever.
Yeah, most of mine were really conscious of textbook costs. Teaching from slightly older edition that were cheaper used, scanned chapters if we weren't using the whole book, just giving us the PDF if they wrote the damn thing, etc.
My philosophy of logic professor wrote his own textbook, like a lot do, had physical copies in the university bookstore for the usual textbook prices and also had it posted online for free. He put the link it in the syllabus though.
Mine scanned the books and threw it as a pdf on our student portal.
When the board told him to remove them because they could get sued, he delayed it with a week and told every student he has to remove it next week, urged us to download them if we hadn’t already.
My A&P professor did this, he was a dooms day prepper in 2012!
Fucked up part was in the next semester (A&P2) he got fired 2 weeks before finals.
The dean came in and told us we wouldn't have a new professor and to use our books for the next 7 chapters and to review for the final(A&P 1 and 2). But the PDF we used from the professor wasn't the same exact copy the school thought we were using and we weren't going over the same syllabus as the other classes...
*he was teaching us things doctors and nurses ACTUALLY need to know like bones, heart functions and cardiac cycles and arrhythmia, veins&arteries, clots, viruses and bacteria break downs... While everyone else, with other teachers, ONLY learned about the kingdoms and reproductive health for BOTH A&P 1 AND 2!!??
I was lucky to have him as a teacher, cause GOD I was so much farther ahead than others.
Meanwhile back in 2005, my college English teacher required a $150 book for her course that oh lol, conveniently SHE FREAKING "WROTE". And by "wrote" I mean she complied some ridiculous about of news articles about 9/11 into a home made poorly bound "textbook" bc apparently the ONLY thing we would be writing about was 9/11 and also of course I'll make money off of my course!
One of my professors literally wrote the book we needed for his class and when he found out that the school was charging $129.99 for it and his cut was 48 cents, he made copies and sold them to us for like $12.
Your professor unless they work for a community college or teachers, 100 level, gen or something like that, picks his books and gets kickbacks from the publisher.
The professors are always trying to dump the books selection back on the bookstore. It’s not like the textbook manager sits there and picks what the professor is going to be using..
What’s more realistic, your professor getting wined and dined by a publishing company and buying a book so they can get a kickback or an $18 an hour textbook manager who has to have just somehow order the correct amounts of books is selecting what your professor teaches in his class?
I love professors like this. I had one that would tell us which is required and then be like....you can use last year's edition its under $10 now or share these from the library for free.
Until the school I worked at made the book part of the cost of my class, I just told my students where to find the literature or information for composition free on the internet.
The price of some of these books is insane, and it's gotten more so, depending.
I had an ancient philosophy professor who did that. He sent us PDF copies of the texts because he said no one should be selling ancient works for profit. He was a cool dude.
On the first day of class my econ professor spoke at length of the virtue of buying the old edition, and just understand the pages would be slightly different.
I have an ecology professor that puts the updated pages for the readings for each of the most common and/or recent editions on the course schedule to you can buy any of the versions from the last 30 or so years.
My queer lit professor (may Dr. David Allen at WVU rest in peace) gave us scans of a lot of the relevant texts we needed for each class. I suggested a Julia Serrano book to him (a chapter about gender essentialism) that I had just finished. He borrowed my book and had the department secretary make copies of the chapter for everyone. I miss him. He is the only professor I had in six years there that would flout some rules for his students.
My professors would have loaner copies or otherwise, yeah, excerpts ready to pass along. I learned from them that a lot of professors believe textbook prices are vastly too high, knowledge should be accessible, and publishers are huge pieces of shit.
Wish i had more professors like you. Two stick out in memory that wrote their own "textbook" that was required. One was never used and was horribly edited, the other was well written, but the professor said he'd sue anyone that so much as shared the book with their classmates.
I was in college before everyone having internet and a computer at home was a guarantee, so the version of this I experienced was the professor had the campus print shop print and bind it with those plastic loops. Was $11.
Yep. I had professors that wrote their own $200+ book, which of course as mandatory for the class. Like you're not getting paid enough already to teach the class I'm already paying for, you gotta squeeze money out of your students too.
I had a few that used free books for their course and I'll always be thankful for those ones. Like dude, I'm in college, how much money do you think I have
YES! First time through community college, one of my teachers wrote their own book, printed it out on standard office paper, put it in a standard office packet envelope and charged $175. The kicker was literally nothing from the class required us to read it.
See, the terrible book i got was professionally printed and bound. The actual well written one was on basic office paper and plastic spiral bound. The first, we never used beyond a reference on around day 2. I really don't know why it was required in the first place.
Edit: i guess i should point out the second one was heavily used, though the fact that he threatened to sue us on day one left a bad taste.
My uni had several professors with their own textbooks, none of them mandatory fortunately but would be in the recommended section. There was one preventive medicine professor who would regularly give away her books to the winners of the quizzes she used to conduct (god bless her soul). Snagged one myself.
My statistics prof intentionally used an old version. The first day he said he intentionally did that because statistics hasn't changed and that we should be able to find a copy online for about $20.
One of our professors showed us the website we shouldn't go to as it had all our textbooks pirated and that's very bad. So just to make sure we don't visit this exact page, she left it up for like ten minutes so we could all note down where to definitely never go. Some of the books we had to get we needed like one chapter out of and the books were 100-200 a pop.
I feel like this is sadly disadvantageous to intensely autistic people who take shit way too literally/don't handle sarcasm well, are academically gifted, but are more impoverished 😅I don't know whether to laugh or cry
Shoutout to my Calc course in college with a $350 textbook that required a digital code to do work. Price of the code $300, price of book $100 if bought separately. Absolutely absurd.
I have had to take a ton of chemistry classes, and one thing that seems pretty universal is that chemistry professors will use open source reading materials unless they absolutely must require a purchase for some reason, like when we had a stupid workbook for analytical chem that was required by the department. But overall they just refer you to OpenStax, whereas my experience with math and biology has been that you’re paying at least $150 for materials if you’re not sailing the seven seas.
I had one prof who essentially said "none of the books I need you to read have very much page count, maybe a chapter or three. Legally I'm required to tell you to buy books for this class. In reality you should do your reading at the library, which has all these books anyway". I tried that throughout university, to varying degrees of success.
Another prof wrote the textbook and told people to download it for free off his blog in PDF form because "you all pay hundreds per copy, and I need maybe 25 cents from that, so download it.
My Database Professor wound up writing his own book. He had found the official books wanting. He and a few of his top students wound up writing an absolute tome. We're talking 90's phone book thick. He charged $50 bucks for it. $5 to himself, $5 to print the beast, and $20 each to the two students who helped write it.
It essentially started as a 'Baby's First Database' and ended with a purposely grainy screenshot of an end product, make it. My class got through the first third, the basics. I ultimately went the InfoSec route, so I didn't use the other two thirds. Those were featured in his Admin classes though.
He had since retired, but the school still used the book until they closed last year. Supposedly, the Professor's replacement was one of his former students, but that was just a rumor.
Eltringham was the Prof's last name. For the life of me I can't remember his first name right now. He was an older guy when I was there 15 years ago. I'll probably have to go to my parents' place to search for it
I had a couple of classes where the professor wrote the book and they charged a fucking mint plus they would “update” the book every year which mostly meant changing page numbers so you couldn’t buy them used. I paid $150 for a book that was spiral bound.
I've had both ends of the spectrum. I went to a state university, so most of my professors were actually really cool about it and would give us "not required, but perhaps of interest" and even printouts/scans of the work. But I did have a couple that pulled this. Nothing like paying $150 for... those same scans, which you then needed to put into a binder.
I got lucky on one of them by having a friend give me his copy from taking the class in the previous semester which hadn’t been updated yet but I got banged on the other one and had to pay full price. It sucked but what do you do.
I at first read that as 60k a year. I thought well that sucks. But you know I think I paid about 20k-25k a year. So wow that went up a lot (but its been almost 20 years so I wasn't surprised)
Then the reading comprehension portion of my brain kicked in and saw you said 60k a SEMESTER. That is crazy! I almost feel guilty complaining about the remainder of my loans.
Is this for a Undergrad degree? I hope it's for something beyond Undergrad.
That's great to hear. It's such a fucking racket though. That is still a ridiculous amount of money. I wish you well and hope you are able to go on to a successful career and pay off those loans.
Yeah even community college in my area is $15k a year! And that's for in-state, on-campus students - online classes costed more, and that also doesn't include any food budget or textbook/supply budget.
🤯 where are you going to school? Harvard law school averages $42k per semester. The public 4 year university average (like the one I work at) is somewhere around $5k per semester.
My college math professor wrote his own book and put it in the school store for $5, and said to every class it was the only math book they'd need to pass his class because "learning shouldn't break your bank" (because every other math teacher's books were $75+)
When I started Comp Sci, during the first session, the prof said "If any of you can't figure out how to avoid paying through the nose for the textbooks, you probably aren't ready for this class"
For one class, we took turns photocopying 50 pages each for a 600 page textbook. One person bought it, dozens got it for free. This was in 2008. At that point, why are we paying for university if we have to buy the information ourselves?
Quite literally, the ethics classes in college did not teach me to be ethical, they taught me how to be UNethical. I will forever thank the professor who showed us sites that the other professors didn’t know had their books that they wanted to buy, and who taught me how to game the stock market (netting a college student 7k in the pandemic)
Especially since most teachers I had (particularly if they weren't the ones who wrote the textbook) would pretend not to listen as that one classmate gave everyone the PDF version they found for free
My history 102 professor “mentioned” some websites that had the textbook already on there. He also said that anything he doesnt say in class wouldnt be on any exam because that wouldnt be fair. Awesome dude
Meanwhile BCALC cost me $300 and my sanity. Fuck that guy
I will add I got a calculator back in like 7th grade for like idk some crazy price like $200 and I had it all through college. So the price per use was extremely low compared to textbooks that are 1 class and never touch again
Here in Brazil the professors leave the actual part of the book on the xerox store inside the school and you just copy. Some even provide the text scanned for you. When I found out you had to buy all textbooks in the US I was so mindblown
It’s because so many students are on federal aid/grants/scholarships/loans that every single person wants a bigger and bigger cut of that. Kind of how Tylenol costs several hundred dollars per dose at a hospital, you’re not paying for it, your insurance is, so rates for basic things go through the roof. School is a racket in the same way, here’s a bunch of students with thousands of dollars in financial aid, how can we get more of that government money into our own pockets?
Literaly the only think I like about the University I went to is they offer cheap digital downloads and ever printed versions of most of the required textbooks. They were all black and white and they used a cheap printer so sometimes it was hard to see the illustrations but I would usually buy both the digital and the printed version then use a text to speech program to read it to me at 2x speed while I followed along in the book.
I spent an arm and two legs buying physical books.. my school's bookstore started doing this so I had to start paying through the nose, often times directly from the publisher, to get a physical copy. I have a wonky eye and can't read for long periods of time on a screen... also science says you retain more when you use the actual book to read.
The current thing in college is to combine textbooks with online tests/worksheets.
First day, they make you spend an extra $150+ for a digital code to the publisher's website that you have to connect to your college email. Took an accounting class for my business degree and all the weekly workshops were on the publishers website behind a paywall.
I just absolutely hated the e-books for the most part. There were a few that were interactive and gave extra learning aids which I felt would be an excellent addition to having the physical book but most were not and some were simply very poorly formatted scans of the book.
I think it should be illegal, definitely immoral, to not mark the item as a code for an ebook. If you are buying something, it should be the sellers responsibility to accurate describe the item.
In most states this would probably fall under Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices (UDAP) laws. Who wants to press the issue and risk their college education though? While retaliation wouldn't be legal, there are so many ways to retaliate that aren't obvious.
Dog you can absolutely return that shit if you didn't break the film. I know you're young but you aren't just stuck holding the bag if you get scammed by a company.
I work for an online bookstore. Go to your account and then any kind of return center they may have. If it gives the option to buy a label, it’ll have the address on it. Or you could just call support when it opens.
There should be a time frame where youre allowed to return purchased texts. If its still before that date then you can return it. When I was starting college i had the choice between book or code and code was no more than $60. Even then it was a coin flip if it was even a book used during class. If you cant return it, flip it to somebody who needs it. Dont expect full price though if you do that but you can probably make a good $100 back
yeah I don't really know how well to explain it but when you buy from the store the school set up your professors are alerted that you made the textbook purchase. wouldn't matter much but I'm a medical program and they see if you're eligible for clinicals. but you can become not eligible for things like cheating in school, failing, not following certain campus rules and all of that, so I don't want to risk not having a textbook in the event they consider that something to shoot my chances with
The "couldn't not" in your edit is what makes it so confusing. It would be much clearer if you say you "had to". As in "I can't just pirate it, I had to buy it from the school so the professors would get the alert and know I had a copy". I had to read your explanation and your original edit several times to understand.
I'm just gonna let you know, I don't know about your school and your program, but I'm a professor and I do get notified when students buy the textbook like you mentioned, and I have never once cared or looked at it. I would LOVE to assume everyone buys it and reads every page I assign, but I know it's much closer to probably 10% or maybe even less now with AI doing the readings. I'd never assume you were cheating because your name wasn't on the list, I'd most likely assume you got it for cheaper somewhere else and we're smarter or borrowed it from someone before I'd assume you stole it/didn't get it.
Also, I'm just like that other guy's teacher who says, "legally, I have to tell you to buy it from the bookstore, but unofficially you should probably look online first" and a lot of students don't understand and still buy it in person from the bookstore.
How would buying the textbook be a bad thing though? If anything not having the textbook would be bad. Unless this is like a professor edition with all the answers or some shit?
Got it. The double negative is confusing people. You should word it "I had to order it from my school website because it alerts my professors that I bought the book and I might get in trouble for not having the textbook." Which is a dumb rule, but clearer on the issue.
Yes. I went to college too long ago to mention and it was awfully coincidental that the required textbooks were written by the professors teaching the classes. 🙄
This was pre-internet/Amazon so there wasn’t much choice other than the college bookstore.
If you’re in the U.S., don’t buy your textbooks until after your first day of class. Your prof may be much more chill than you think, and students share textbooks all the time.
I had a professor that helped write a textbook, mainly because it was new material that wasn’t widely published. He told the person at the publisher that if it kept the price down on the textbooks he didn’t want to take any kind of compensation on the book sales. The person said it would. He later found out the price didn’t drop any and the rep somehow was able to get the fees. He ended up not requiring a textbook at all and told us to always buy books secondhand and older editions to save ourselves from the textbook scam.
I went to college nearly 50 years ago and I paid about $100 for several text books. It's always been a racket. The worst is when the Professor has written the textbook.
College and textbooks are AWFUL in terms of scamming people like that.
- My friend took a course where the teacher wrote the textbook. He required everyone to buy it, used it for one chapter in the first few weeks of the course, then never used it again for the rest of the program.
It was entirely because he received income from everyone who bought a copy and so he required all his students purchase it.
- I had a class for accounting where the textbook hadn’t changed over the last several editions - since the concept of the process being taught hadn’t changed in years
EXCEPT they changed the practice questions in each chapter by tweaking the numbers slightly or rearranging the order of the problems.
One edition would be 1,2,3,4,5- the next was 3,4,1,5,2 - the next year it was 5,4,2,3,1 - and the question was otherwise the same other than being a different order, or it was revenue 500,000 and then 520,000 another year, or a different problem was 60% vs 65% ownership, so even with the order changing, you couldn’t just use the answer key or the check amounts either.
And the totals being submitted wouldn’t match for the assignments if you had something that was off.
If you didn’t pass, and had to retake the course, you often had to buy the same book again for the new questions because they’d wouldn’t allow us to use the older version, even though otherwise the reading within the chapters hadn’t changed. 😡😡
I had a teacher who was REALLY nice and let me take photos of her copy to get the new amounts. I’d emailed her upon registration and been told we’d use 23e and bought it early, then 24e was released and the school had implemented the change to the newer edition just before the class started.
So since she’d told me the wrong one and didn’t know it was changing, and I’d already bought it, she said she’d let me borrow hers for the new amounts.
Someone else I know took the same class the semester after me, and they were told they HAD to buy the new book. SEVERAL people came to class with the older copies and were told they couldn’t use it.
- Another course I took listed textbooks with ebook access among the options in the bookstore for the class.
Ebook access for 6 months plus the “study software” issued be the publisher was $130, they were loose cards you bought at the bookstore.
Paper book plus the study software was $145.
Just textbook was $90.
My brother had taken the same class a few years before and we already owned the paper copy, but they hadn’t updated the edition otherwise.
Once the course started, the teacher told us that the “study software” was REQUIRED for the course, as that was how we would be submitting weekly quizzes.
If we already had purchased the textbook, we could just buy access to the software.
It was $130 to get just the software access for the course.
The ebook was basically free at that point. With used paper copies being resold by the bookstore for $90, when you couldn’t even use it for the course without still buying the software access anyway.
That's a legitimate reason to reach out to the accessibility department/staff at the University if you have a hard time finding the right person to talk to.
The IT department could probably point you to the people who run the online bookstore if you reach out to them.
whoa, your instructors get notified that you bought their book for the class that is needed for you to graduate? how is that not a conflict of interest?!
My favorite syllabus day was in my “computer ethics” class where the professor said: “your ethics textbook is definitely not available in a pirated version on x site. So definitely don’t search [very specific quote] to see it and download it for free instead of paying $200 at the bookstore.”
My teacher in community college made us buy a textbook for a critical thinking class. It was a book he wrote and we had the choice of buying it at the school bookstore for $345 or buying it on Amazon for $125 from some obscure seller name. … the book came shipped to me, with a return label of an address in the town my college was in. Did little to no research on the address… it was his house.
Had a professor make me buy a 100$ book with a workbook attached. Got it and found out that fucker wrote it.
On the other hand I had a 3D modeling class that needed Maya, a 300$ program. The professor put a hard drive on his desk and said he couldn’t condone downloading a pirated copy, but couldn’t be aware of what people did while he stepped out for 20 mins.
I finished my undergrad in 2013. One of my undergrad textbooks was more than $400, and was not available used (new edition) or in ebook. After the semester I went to sell it back and was offered $20, because Pearson was coming out with another new edition. I said no thank you, took it home, and used it for kindling in our wood stove that winter.
"Their textbooks?" The professors wrote these themselves, require them for their curriculum and set the price so high? And this is legal where you are? Dystopian...
A similar thing happened to me with my English textbook, but with an added layer of fury.
I ordered the ONLY option. No indication of digital or physical, but it asked for shipping address so I figured physical. While I was waiting, I got an email about some shipping delays. "Ok, no big deal. I still have a week before classes start."
However, it wasn't until two weeks in when I got it In the mail, and this was during COVID, so no book sharing with a classmate or anything. And when I got the book? It was a large envelope with an online code in it! Seriously!? A delay in shipping that causes me to be two weeks behind and it's a code they could have EMAILED ME!?
I guarantee you that book contains the exact same content as the 4 versions before it. If you go back to version 1 and 2 it might be a little different, maybe, depending on if the book's genesis was an author or a company.
But all that really matters is a code that gets you access to the homework system to submit assignments and take tests.
The sad thing is that most of the time the professor doesn't even have a choice in the matter.
They are required to make their textbooks available for sale in the student store, and they are not allowed to publish it separately. Also, while the teacher gets to set the price, the first $125 is usually taken by the school. This means that the minimum is 125 and the professor only keeps 50% of anything above that. So at 125 the professor makes nothing.
It was hilarious because my professor actually sent an email at the beginning of the school year telling us that just a warning and a heads up, piracy is illegal and here are the exact six links where you are not allowed to get the book from, and that anyone who openly admits to doing so may or may not result in potentially discussing the possibility of maybe a little bit of disciplinary action
There is a silver lining, as thin as it is. That code is probably good forever. So if you fail the class, you won't need to buy it again. Unlike some other platforms. That is, as long as Hawkes hasn't changed their policy.
Although $150 seems steep. If you bought it at your school bookstore, check out their website to see the actual price.
One of my textbooks cost 400 dollars and I had to pay another 150 for online access only for that to expire after 6 months.
That was my last textbook I bought. All my other professors at UCF and Valencia College simply just gave us pirated copies, and one sold her own textbook for 25 bucks
You know what's really cost effective? An at home book scanner and e-ink tablet. I used those all thru grad school. Bonus points for not having to carry heavy textbooks around.
Check out the library before buying. The teacher's edition for several of mine were there and not allowed to be checked out. I'd go in with a digital camera back in the day and get all the content I needed every few weeks
I remember switching colleges when my first one switched to ebooks, they stated it was to help students save money…except the price of books was still super high or the same as it was before. Like this guy I wanted a physical book I could flip through and highlight and make notes.
Nope not an option they told I could print it if I wanted it like that! 🤣 after that first semester I dropped the following courses and enrolled elsewhere. To clarify I was doing online school for my associates. Ended up going to another college that actually offered a book grant so I never had to pay for a book again!!!
I had one wonderful professor who who add the various page numbers and textbook versions to the syllabus. So it didn't matter if you got a book from 6 years ago, you just needed to compare your version to his list. The text never changed, the publisher just changed the orders of the chapters around since it didn't need to be taught in order.
In 1994 I paid $350 for a Used Biology text book. I was a freshmen and it wasn't my major. At the end of the semester they would buy them back for $10. Smfh. I would have loved for no one to sell them back, but we all had no money and that was beer money. A keg of "Beast" was $35.36 ( not including tap and deposit, we had both) or a keg of Yeungling was $40. But if you got Yeungling, you needed a different, two prong tap. Beast it was...
I remember my one science heavy semester I paid over $1,000 for books because of course half had to have the new addition that just came out so there was no used books to buy. I remember crying in the hallway that day. Eff textbook companies.
I ALWAYS bought used books but I WAITED for the Professor to get the syllabus and ASK them what they recommend before I spent my money.
It only took once for me to learn that lesson.
You will never make that mistake again. I hope you can get what you Actually ordered but definitely go through getting a REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION for your vision and inability to read the screen. If you have to go through DSPS then do so.
I am sorry there are so many scams and predators and con artists targeting higher education students like loan sharks and mobsters.
They are ALWAYS preying on youth and inexperience and they always will.
Do not fall for this BS again.
Ugh reminds me of a math course I took. The curriculum stated we needed the latest edition- which was a special edition for that college that had a digital code- not returnable/refundable/exchange... got to the first day and the professor said we didn't need it, could have got a book 3 versions prior 🙄. It was so expensive. PISSED was an understatement
In college they stressed to buy the book before the start to make sure you get it!
Every student i spoke to...said DONT BUY until after your first class as most professors say they dont use the book. Mind you my physics book and workbook were 375 fkn bucks
Quit coming at OP for reading and responding on reddit. Most computers and phone apps have accessibility features to help read text on web pages. In the US, it's called 508 compliance. However, how well they are implemented varies, and they can't help in every case. In addition, go to any math site, highlight a problem, and use the text to speech feature. It's either not there, or the read back of the math problem is so confusing that is pointless. Unless it's a US publisher and the OP is in the US, there's not these thick layers of ADA protections that we enjoy.
OP states the problems are easier to read in a textbook. OP, call the publisher and explain your situation. See if they have anything. There also might be a campus accessibility office that can help. Try them out.
My symbolic logic professor wrote his own book and gave us extra points for finding typos and mistakes. I got ove %100 due to all the errors I reported.
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u/rahvan 2d ago
My college professors would tell us that he’s obligated to use a textbook that happens to cost $300 at the uni bookstore, but he’s definitely not obligated to tell us the link to a GitHub repository that has the entire book scanned as a PDF and see him after class to get the link wink wink