Just another way our society is looking like a Second Gilded age...
[QUOTE=Intoxicated Spy;50463065]I had a custom edition, that had no bindings, so I had buy a binder for it too, pages sort of got fucked too since of the bullshit, it was $200[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I've seen that a lot on campus, particularly for language courses. If I'm paying $120 for a spanish text book, I should get some binding on it and not have to shell out another $10 because of their cheapness
Due to financial aid and scholarships, I didn't pay anything out of pocket, but fuckin' $385 for a Microbiology textbook and access code (Didn't even need the access code because online homework was optional). And $435 dollars for an organic chemistry textbook and access code, granted this one lasts for two years. Neither could be rented.
I think the most detestable fact is that these people are ripping off college students. You know, college students, the butt of every poor person and top ramen joke there is?
In that regard illegal sharing of textbooks gets a sort of Robin Hood mentality, benefiting the poor at the expense of the rich heads of publishing companies.
my friend had a program that did some magic to trial versions of online textbooks that stripped out the trial and left you with the complete book. saved me like 400 dollars my last semester
[QUOTE=Intoxicated Spy;50463065]I had a custom edition, that had no bindings, so I had buy a binder for it too, pages sort of got fucked too since of the bullshit, it was $200[/QUOTE]
This was the case for my fucking calculus class.
Of course I couldn't buy used because ~online components.~
Never even needed the book either, it was all in-class material.
this shit should be fucking illegal
I'm in my 3rd year of University in the Netherlands and I think I've saved about 1800€ so far on books. I simply refused to by any single one and instead I borrowed books from the library and scanned the 30 pages we needed for the course (out of the 900 pages in the book).
I have a friend who had to buy her textbooks. One was $400 and it was just plastic sealed loose paper with 3 holes punched through them for you to put into a binder
What a joke
[QUOTE=Gray Altoid;50462136]The person who invented Pearson's MyMathlab is satan.[/QUOTE]
OH MY GOD! Fuck MyMathLab
What's really great is when you have professors requiring books that they themselves published and do arbitrary changes every year or two to ensure their students have to purchase new copies that they get royalties from. This is more common than you'd think in soft and more off-the-beaten-path hard sciences. Almost as bad are "university specific" versions of national textbooks that basically are the same book with different chapter orders but don't have nearly the used market.
So glad my college doesn't require you to buy textbooks. I hope I don't end up running into it in uni though.
[QUOTE=Swilly;50463683]OH MY GOD! Fuck MyMathLab[/QUOTE]
What's the deal with mymathlab? I've only ever had to use MyOMLab
Paid $200 for a calc textbook which we only used for hw practice problems.
[QUOTE=Levelog;50465574]What's really great is when you have professors requiring books that they themselves published and do arbitrary changes every year or two to ensure their students have to purchase new copies that they get royalties from. This is more common than you'd think in soft and more off-the-beaten-path hard sciences. Almost as bad are "university specific" versions of national textbooks that basically are the same book with different chapter orders but don't have nearly the used market.[/QUOTE]
There's some ethics class I have to take where one professor wrote his own book that is only sold from the bookstore that costs well over 100 smackers. Fortunately there's another offering of the class with a different professor that uses two other books that I can rent from Amazon for like peanuts by comparison.
I just finished a Linear Algebra course. The teacher required the latest edition. One of my classmates had a PDF of the previous version, and the biggest difference we saw was a complete reordering of the problems.
So in the newest edition, problem 1.14 would end up being 1.09 in the older edition, 3.27 would be 3.08, et cetera. So you absolutely had to buy the newest edition or else you'd be doing the wrong fucking questions.
It's absolutely ridiculous. At least I didn't have to deal with MyMathLab again (so help me God I would have gone postal trying to input differential equations into that bullshit.)
[QUOTE=Gray Altoid;50462136]The person who invented Pearson's MyMathlab is satan.[/QUOTE]
Had an incompetent math teacher where all the test problems where not even related to what was on MyMathLab aka all the fucking homework. (did I mentioned this was a online class?)
Everyone dropped and a bunch of us lodged complaints, eventually got a full semester refund for all my classes but it fucked up my graduation.
Her defense was that we didn't do every single practice problem in the book, what a fucking joke.
My books are still pretty expensive, but at least my university really doesn't care whether I buy those exact ones, buy something else or just read nothing at all.
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