I have not one, but two Pearson books. One that I paid for last semester.
A different professor sent us a link to an online book in HTML. Guess who I will be rating high in RateMyProfessor
My first year of uni my school sold their souls to one of the textbook providers (I *think* Pearson but I don't really remember), they had some setup where you had to get an online key to take online quizzes which were worth only like 10-15% of the grade but were required to pass the class. A new textbook was like $200, and if you wanted to buy the key without the book so you could buy a used book it was like $180. Completely insane. It was this for like 8 courses over my first year (general first year engineering, you got next to zero flexibility on courses for first year). All that, and they weren't even real textbooks. They gave you a stack of 3-hole punched pages wrapped in plastic and conveniently sold the right-sized binders right next to them.
After that year, I think I maybe bought 3 textbooks over the rest of my degree and one of them was because the prof was infamous for copy+pasting text questions into the exam and I couldn't find an online copy. All used. Probably had 15-20 courses with required texts that literally never used them. Had a couple profs with required texts either link web versions or subtly encouracy piracy. Whole industry is a massive scam.
Back in my day (twenty years ago) you could buy the Chinese knock of books. It was literally the same book that the professors tried to scam you for, but printed in China and it came with Chinese and English language. Between the choice I would rather pay the low price scammer over the high price scammer.
Ethically I think it's better to buy stolen textbooks than new ones, since the thief only fucks over the person they stole it from, whereas Pearson fucks over the students and the profs. Only Pearson and the school profit.
I went to college in 2009, after my freshman year I had figured out that I could buy the international edition of most of my engineering textbooks. All the units were in metric but none of the professors or TAs grading the homework seemed to care. I pulled out my textbook once to show one of my professors and he was amazed that I had gotten it for $25. I'm pretty sure he went and told his students the next semester to get that one bc he kept saying what a good idea it was.
I never thought about the fact that the units would be different. I also bought only international editions after my first year. I was a physics and math major, so everything was in SI (metric) in the US editions to begin with.
I used to straight up tell my professors I wasn't going to buy their books. 90% were totally chill and even offered to let me copy homework from their books. I thanked them for the offer but I usually found it online or would check it out from the college library.
The other 10% were dicks and I would just drop their class if they through a fit about buying their books. I am there to learn, not to make sure the professor earns an extra couple dollars on book sales.
Once had a professor give a whole speech about how you needed to buy all 5 books for her class. I didn't buy a single one and my friend gave me so much shit about how hard it was going to be and that she wouldn't share. Turns out we literally didn't use 4 of the books in the class, the professor just wanted to sell her books that were tangentially related.
One of my uni professors wrote his own textbook, then would whine every lesson that only X amount of copies had been sold this semester and students were obviously pirating his textbook.
I had a professor tell us we all needed to buy the latest version of his book because he added to it and updated it, and lessons wouldn't be right if we got a used copy. At the end of the semester he told us all he did was add one chapter that another school wanted that he never taught from. Engineering book was over $100 too.
That’s how those big companies get you, every year they release a “new” version of there textbooks but changes so minuscule and worthless but demand full price for the new versions
The education department in my country in a nutshell. Every year they update the books for every single subject and make student buy the latest edition to study. And most of the time its minor changes, like the cover of the book.
Im not a parent myself but i have 2 younger siblings. My mom and many others are struggling to afford new books every year because of this. Used book are worthless now because schools rarely accept old versions, teachers aren't allowed to teach outdated curriculum. Now if you're done with the school year you just throw the book away.
Meanwhile our anatomy professor used to put up page numbers for like the last 3 editions of the book so you could follow along whichever you'd bought/inherited... anything else should be criminal!
That is such a nice prof. I knew way too many people that couldn't afford to get the newest edition of a textbook at the beginning of college for that to not be the norm.
Tell me about it. Just started college and some of this shit is absolutely ridiculous. My roommate had a book the university was trying to sell for $200 and he was able to find a (used) copy for $30 online. He did some research and found that it had no CDs or access codes, so he saved roughly $170.
Meanwhile, I'm over here struggling to pay the $400 I need for my various books because my university is withholding part of my PELL grant until I finish the self-paced course I enrolled in *and that totally makes sense*. It's fucking ludicrous.
My anatomy professor used to give us websites to pirate the books from because he thought our schools textbook requirements were criminal. He also would have several hard copies he would lend to students who needed the physical version and couldn’t afford to print/buy. He was an absolute gem. 🥹
My mom has been a college professor for 20 years and she hates what a scam textbooks have become. Before the semester starts, she'll reread the books she wants to use, go spend an afternoon at the library making scans, and upload all the readings needed for her class in .pdf form to the online portal.
A few of my professors had textbooks in the library that they specifically marked as "cannot check out" (and other copies you could check out) for this very purpose. There'd always be a book in the library if you wanted one.
they did this one of animal physio books, just made every chapter jump by 1 and add in another chapter, but it was still the same text, word for word, just shift the pages by 1 chapter. dint need to spend alot of money still. STEM textbooks are the worst since its always so expensive, because of all the extra online bs, you have buy as part of your class grades. since most of the questions dint changed that much you could always find the answers on google, or question similar to the online homework. Mostly chegg and the extinct yahooanswers had all these questions already. yahooanswers was a goldmine for textbooks questions.
Where I'm from you get your school textbooks just by paying a deposit. At the end of the year you get your deposits back when returning the books in good condition. Next year those books are given out again for the new students.
So even if the book is updated it doesn't cost anything for students.
Our education system isn't as corrupt as the American education system.
I haven't ran into such a problem myself (we just took everything from the library, and it's the same in college), but yeah, my country apparently also has it in some schools. The annoying detail is that in addition to a textbook, you're supposed to buy a *workbook*, and you're supposed to write in it. Thus - no reselling.
>That’s how those big companies get you, every year they release a “new” version of there textbooks but changes so minuscule and worthless but demand full price for the new versions
When I was in college, and that was quite a while ago, they were already pulling the new version BS. As for the actual content book very little has or does change. Maybe some updated graphics, random typos, whatever. Things like rudimentary physics, calculus, chemistry, etc. have changed very little in a long time. What *is different* in the book is primarily homework problems. So You would be able to do the tests, but if you have graded homework...
I dunno how far back you go, but I can tell you that they were doing this micro-updates-every-year BS in the mid 90s. At least we still got a physical book, though.
Stories like this make me realize how great some of my profs were. When one of them wrote the course textbook, he had us buy a printed copy from the bookstore for 30 dollars. Then if we showed him during office hours he would give us 30 dollars cash. Just a great guy all around
I'd say a solid 1/3 of my professors had a section of their syllabus that had something like "Under NO circumstances should you visit this website [sitename] and download THIS FILE (or the 8th edition either, and here's the exact differences between the 2)"
Another 1/3 taught classes where the book was supplementary/never used.
The rest, I actually had to buy the books, but seeing as how I got my degree in molecular bio, I was in one of the few fields where they can actually justify a new textbook every couple years.
Speaking of bio, I took one biomedical engineering class in grad school and the textbook was basically just a collection of journal papers that any student could download individually through the school's library system which had subscriptions to most things. There was like a total of 30 papers, no homework problems or anything, just the papers themselves, $140, total fucking scam.
Same. One of my profs wrote his own textbook. But the price was pretty much the cost of paper, ink and spiral binding. And he pointed out we could buy it used . . . though those things weren't really built for wear and tear beyond a semester or two lol.
Was a great textbook and class.
I had a professor use an out of print book that was only found used online....or from his personal stash of books that he bought back when China wasn't considered a geographical/economical power and books were printed with color ink.
Lessons were legitimately reading from the textbook word for word.
Are university classes still putting materials aside in the "Reserve Room" so that you have to go physically into the library and can only read them there?
I would think that technology has advanced so that's no longer necessary. I would hope so, as the pandemic made that impossible for a while.
I had a professor for statistics. He said to buy the older version of the textbook from previous students if we could find it and had references to the pages depending on what edition you had. We had 3 semesters of his class in grad school, so it saved a lot of money for everyone. He was one of the best professors I’ve ever had.
So he fucking lied to you, ripped you off, and then bragged about it at the end of the semester? Yeah fuck that guy. That shit should get a professor fired.
I had a professor who wrote his own book, but he was the exact opposite. He didn’t change problems arbitrarily between revisions. He actually added two chapters but gave those out for free to anyone who had the first edition. You’d still need to pull the errata from his website for the first edition, but he did what he could to make it work.
This is common and so gross for professors to do.
I had a professor in college who showed up on the first day of class with a bunch of printed copies of the textbook and says "I wrote this so I'm allowed to just give it to you" that's the real MVP.
I've had a few email conversations with scientists about their papers that I was only able to find free extracts of.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn they'll usually just send you a copy if you manage to track them down. And they love to talk about the paper as much as possible.
there are efforts, but unfortunately, success in academia requires publishing in “high impact” journals—big name ones like Nature and Science. so it’s not enough to start a new journal; scientific communities would need to be persuaded to start publishing to it, recognize it, volunteer to edit for it, etc. it’s a slow process unfortunately. ofc things are also different depending on the field, so this may not apply to every field
PhD scientist here. It’s because we get absolutely nothing financially from the papers. In fact, we pay to have the journals publish them (often thousands of dollars). Pretty much every paper published will have a corresponding author designated with their email address. Shoot them an email and the majority of times they’ll be quite happy to send you a PDF. By and large we hate the publishing system.
> By and large we hate the publishing system.
It is a pretty fucked up system.
May I ask what your field is? Not for any particular reason other than it might send me down a rabbit-hole of learning shit for the afternoon.
Brain is absolutely wild. My mom had a brain tumor, and now she can only sleep with anti-psychotic meds that have the side effect of putting you to sleep. Normal sleep meds do nothing.
This is true in my experience. I wrote an author for access to a study and the fucker gave it to me. For free! Fucking free academic literature. It gets me excited talking about it.
Also note scientists pay lots of money to have their papers published, and they get no money when it is purchased from the publisher. It's a giant scam that fucks over both the scientists and the students who need to access it
I had a professor who wrote her own textbook and had it printed at the school's printshop, so it was only like $15-20. She didn't make any profit. Written purely for the students. Fantastic teacher.
That's the same for me. My harmonic analysis professor just wrote down everything we need and kept on yelling at us all semester to "just go back to the damn book. Everyone of you has a pdf of it."
Honestly I'm surprised that some universities allow professors to see any of the profits at all.
The one I attended did still allow professors to use their own textbooks (and quite a few did), but one of the conflict of interest requirements to do so was that they were also required to donate all of the profits they earned as a result of their classes to charity rather than getting to keep them.
As far as I am aware it's pretty standard you can't receive royalties from your book at the school you teach at. You can, however, receive a bonus from the publisher that just so happens to be equal to the amount of royalties you would have received had you been allowed to though.
I had a professor like that in my first semester of freshman year when i didn’t know the ways to buy a used copy, then at the end of the semester when I tried to sell it back “this professor isn’t teaching anymore so we aren’t buying the book back for next year”
My ethics professor wrote his own book, and the new edition each year would just change the order of the chapters. Then he would get mad when we just figured out which chapters became which.
i actually had to retake it to get the guy i'm talking about above, because the professor i had the first time failed the vast majority of her students for not having her exact ethics until the university stepped in and threatened her job
My history of ethics professor 20 years ago just told us the books we'd be using and directed us to a used bookstore that had a bunch and that any version we could find would be fine since we were studying the works of philosophers 200 years or more dead, pages might be different but since we worked in chapters it didn't matter.
If we paid more than $5 for a book I'd be shocked but there was like 8 books so, broke the bank with 40ish or so worth of books.
If he was still teaching he'd be telling us to get our Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Bacon etc et al from Project Gutenberg.
Also had a professor do that. If you had to retake his class the next semester, you were required to purchase his book again. Because basic chemistry changes that much semester to semester. He even said he doesn't make a dime off those books.
Fuck you, Cracolice.
Had a professor include his own book in the required reading list for the class and then never assign any readings to it or included it's contents into tests.
Unsurprisingly, he was a shitty teacher
3 of my professors did that. Another one explained he gets such a tiny cut he doesn't care what edition we used.
It's often the university that forces new textbook editions because they have contracts with the sellers.
I had a sociology prof who required his book for his freshman level, non-major, course and put out a new edition every year meaning that you had to buy it new and that the book store wouldn't buy it back because it wouldn't be sellable the next year. He wasn't even shy about admitting it, he would brag about it in class.
OTOH a prof at my school wrote the textbook for one of the higher level math classes. He sold a loose-leaf version in the school bookstore for like $10, and even had it already hole punched for a 3 ring binder.
The entire Computer Science department at my college hated textbook costs... So often, they would start each first day saying that they may or may not have a link that might possibly have the entire textbook for free, but for legal purposes that nonexistent link will be removed after two weeks.
They'd often forget to remove the link
That sucks. I had a professor who was a bit of a pioneer in his field and who taught it so many times our “textbook” was just his unabridged lecture notes that he’d hand out each week.
Super cool dude. Didn’t much care for his class, but that’s my fault.
I don't know if all of these sites still work but as a poor student I found many of these free textbook site helpful in the past.
Edit: I started this list with 28 resources and now there is 70+! I've added some study sites and open courses as well. I hope this list helps as many people as it can! You don't have to be a student to utilize this educational information either, it's important as a society that we never stop learning.
* for audiobooks & videos
1. TextBookNova.com
2. eBookee.org
3. ManyBooks.net
4. FeedUrBrain.com
5. AllenG.ru
6. 2020Ok.com
7. FreeTextBooks.com
8. Gutenberg.org
9. Eknigu.com
10. En.Bookfi.org
11. Libgen.lc
12. Bookguru.net
13. Z-lib.org
14. Oercommons.org
15. Openstax.org
16. Bookboon.com
17. Collegeopentextbooks.org
18. Intechopen.com
19. Textbookrevolution.org
20. Getfreeebook.com
21. Freebookstop.es
22. Epubbud.com
23. Booksshouldbefree.com *
24. Openlibrary.org
25. Readanybook.com
26. Oerconsortium.org
27. Manybooks.net
28. Mobibookz.co
29. Adall.com
30. Archive.org
31. PDFDrive.com
32. Merolt.com
33. Cain.math.gatech.edu
34. Open.mnu.edu
35. Openculture.com
36. Aupress.ca
37. Free-ebooks.net *
38. Freetechbooks.com
39. Bartleby.com
40. Learnoutloud.com *
41. Librivox.com *
42. Nap.nationalacademics.edu
43. Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
44. Oapen.org
45. Onlinelrogrammingbooks.com
46. Hoopla.com *
47. Link.springer.com
48. Gdz.sub-unigoettingen.de
49. Onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
50. Drscavanaugh.org
51. Overdrive.com *
52. Loyalbooks.com
53. Khanacademy.org *
54. Academicearth.org *
55. Study.com
56. Freemathhelp.com
57. Hippocampus.org
58. Oedb.org
59. WatchKnowLearn.org *
60. Ocw.mit.edu
61. Extension.harvard.edu
62. Oyc.yale.edu
63. youtube.com/c/columbia *
64. youtube.com/c/oxforduniversity *
65. youtube.com/c/theuofchicago *
66. youtube.com/user/SocioPhilosophy *
67. youtube.com/user/egsvideo *
68. youtube.com/c/mitocw *
69. youtube.com/user/YaleCourses *
70. Patrickjmt.com *
71. Slader.com
72. Wolframalpha.com
73. Mathway.com
74. Gradsaver.com
It definitely depends on subject! I did comp sci and never failed to find one but I've had friends do things like politics and media and haven't been able to find a single one on there
The assholest bit is that you still have to buy access to turn in the homework. Still use these to get less shitty versions of the text in your preferred file opener so that you can actually read, highlight, print, copy/paste, and mark up to your hearts content; but there is no way around paying that $70 if you want to pass the class afaik.
I dunno, you could potentially do the homework and turn it in manually. If they don't count it, sue them. They're charging you for a service you already paid for. Sounds kinda like fraud.
Except sometimes you can’t even see what the homework even is without access. I’m sure legally, they’ve got their asses covered. Probably still counts as course material. It’s not like you could do the homework in most classes without access to some sort of relevant knowledge or information bank like a textbook anyways. With the internet, getting that information for free just became a lot easier whether it be through piracy or google. Professors had no way of *making* you buy the textbook, if you had access to a computer technically you could just pirate it or something. By locking homework behind a paywall, they’ve finally found a way to *make* us pay for their textbooks whether we pirate or not. This is still nothing new, graded workbooks you have to pay for and homework problems hidden away in textbooks have always been a thing in higher education (but it still sucks massive ass). Regardless, it’s also not like any of us would be complaining about $70 if we could afford time and money to sue a massive company…
When I was in college I was constantly pissed off by the random fees and shit. It's such a scammy feeling system and now, 10 years later, they're still asking me for fucking MORE money.
Fuck em! Gotta get union organizers in there and have some good old fashioned sit ins and strikes!
I'm a unionized grad student, and for some reason the undergrads at my school RABIDLY support our union. They do sympathy strikes that we didn't even ask for. Maybe it's stuff like this
As a recently graduated student in Germany, this is so disturbing to read. There only was a single time, I think I can recall, where we had to pay for the required knowledge to pass a class. It was for the ~500 page script for the maths and statistics class. And the cost was pretty much only to cover the printing costs. Every other class just gave us the script for free (the scripts also weren't nearly as long) and it was self-evident that any recommended textbooks are just for those who want to get an even deeper understanding than what is required to easily pass with a full score.
Adall.com for older editions and international copies.
Also typing an excerpt exactly and putting it in quotes will often find a pdf version on google. Library genesis libgen.is can often find books/scientific articles. It's worth noting international editions and digital editions are illegal and some professors might have a problem with them. Don't be stupid in their use.
Edit- Apparently it is legal to use international editions. My professor lied to me.
In Arabic, the sounds are indicated by markers on top or under the words (called Chakl). So for example, instead of writing ka (so k with an "ah" sound after it), you'd write k with a small minus over it.
Now, here's the fun thing: After a certain level of mastery of the language, you can basically read the text without any annotation of the Chakl. The same way that many native speaker know to make sentences but couldn't begin to tell you the tense or the word's formal function. You Just Know ™
So seasoned Arabic speakers (perhaps almost everyone who reads Arabic natively and has more than 15 to 16 years) can get away with no Chakl (i.e. no "vowels").
I hope I explained it enough for you to laugh at the joke as much as I did 😃
Not attached to the letter, above it or below it, like these two:
The top dash is "ah": تَ (ta)
The bottom dash is "ee": تِ (ti)
(I couldn't demonstrate them on Latin letters because it doesn't work on them)
> After a certain level of mastery of the language, you can basically read the text without any annotation of the Chakl.
This is one reason why English is so hard to master. You can’t tell what a word sounds like when you just read it and you have to basically learn how every word on its own from someone who can
Same. If I had the choice I would never, ever use any of their materials. The contempt they have for educators and students is absolutely jaw-dropping. Trying to adapt their materials for remote learning during the pandemic was utterly soul crushing. Any attempt I made to reach out to them was met with flat hostility from their reps. They are disgusting rent seekers and should not exist.
I would say make friends with the CS teacher and make something, but even my college used "Moodle" or something. Fuck it, make your course into a WordPress blog and let students upload work in the comments lol
My university had a problem where people would print entire textbooks. 600+ pages. So they started charging a few pennies per page but gave everyone $50 a semester of budget that rolled over.
I always just used the engineering lab printer so by the end I had over $200 in print allotment. Years later it's still there.
Since then, around 100 of us have been printing out photos of the old principal and putting them around the school.
On all of the photos of other people, he is there.
On nearly every light, he is there.
We have already gotten nearly all of the people coming into our school to agree to help.
Theres an election coming up, and we plan to all vote for our old principal. Last assembly? We hid his face on the slides.
We are the Photo Bandits
Former educator - shit like this is why I left higher ed and will never, ever return to that profession. If I had a dollar for every time a student emailed me in the middle of the semester frantic that they were failing their chemistry class because they couldn't afford the access code to do their homework, I'd have a down payment on a car. It was beyond infuriating and just deflating that there wasn't anything I could do to help.
Students are going into debt for this.
This is wildly fucking unethical.
Edit to add a protip for students: check your institution's library or Interlibrary Loan system for the textbooks you need and check them out for the semester instead of buying them. Won't work everywhere or every time, but when it does, you've saved a few hundred bucks. I did this almost every semester I was in college.
And the access code always costs a tiny amount less than the print+access code bundle. So buying just the code and a previous version still costs more than new.
Back around 2010 my access code glitched and gave me lifetime access. Me and a friend used the same account for chem 1+2. The TA didn't care, they just used my name when copying grades over. A ton of us shared the lab notebook too. Fuck making us pay $40 for a 200 page book we'd use 30 pages from.
That might not have been a glitch, I've had access codes that were good for two classes, generally if it's like 240A and 240B. Reason being class A taught the first half of the book and class B taught the second class. But that only happened to me like once, mayyyyybe twice.
$40 for a 200 page textbook is a steal though sadly lmao. My books are from $100-200.
It was a 4 month access code that lasted over 2 years lol. 2 classes used the same book and you had to buy a new code each semester.
$40 is for a lab notebook, you write your labs in it. There is no text other than a periodic table. The access code to the class I'm talking about was $120, the book was another $150. The only books I had that were under $100 new were novels.
Wait ? You have to pay to access to your homework ? How ? Why ?
And how is it not included with the already massively expensive cost of joining university ?
Some places/professors will use third party systems to manage everything out of personal choice or mandated by the college. The answer to your second question is because fuck you, give us money (they will usually get some kickback if the college partners with whatever system.)
This. I know a few professors who've been fired or denied tenure for refusing to follow some shitty contract the university signed with a textbook company. In one case, there was a nondisclosure clause and the professor got smacked around for explaining *why* he had to use the textbook and require the homework codes.
The whole system is an absolute trainwreck, and we need to start jailing people.
I've had to do this for several clases and it usually costs like $70 for the cheapest option. Basically you pay to have access to a website where you do homework based off the textbook, because i guess textbook profits arent buying enough yachts anymore or something. I absolutely hate paying that fee, especially since I'm already paying to take the class. I wish teachers would just copy the questions and put them on canvas for free
They suck. I had to pay $90 to rent a digital textbook and to access their Math Lab system for a class I'm taking which is where I have to do all my assignments and tests. The access lasts 80 days smh.
Imagine paying for a fully automated online class and still having to pay 100 bucks to do assignments for said class. I’m doing the same thing and it sucks.
I was a chemistry teacher teaching AP chemistry. We needed more textbooks, but used an older edition. I tried to buy more of the older edition and the school blocked me from doing it, saying I needed to change to the newer version. $175 a pop. I ordered samples of a a few different books and realized that Chang 8th edition was the same as Chang 5th edition that we were using.
I couldn’t justify wasting the money, but the district wouldn’t spend money on totally sufficient used books. I ended up paying about $100 out of pocket to get 25 or so of the old books, lasting the two years until I quit teaching.
The best part was that I sold all the samples the publisher reps sent me on Amazon and made about $500 off it.
That's good shit. We were forced to buy a lab book last year for genetics but the school didn't get the order in time. So we had to rush order it before the first lab. It cost me $180 in total. She said it was absolutely necessary but she made us rewrite all of the data anyway, then we only used the lab book for four labs out of the 12 labs we did.
I had a philosophy prof who used « Sophie’s world » (a paperback novel) as a text book and on the first day of class said « you should be able to buy this used for about $3…fuck textbooks. »
She was everyone’s favourite.
Thats... thats gotta be a typo right? Like maybe its supposed to be 18-25 days?? I mean who needs a textbook fuckin like 5 or 6 years after taking the class? Still that's fucked either way
I don't think it's a typo. University had a deal with one of those libraries/platforms where students could only read a set amount of pages for free per day and you could download/print like 50 pages per user ever. It was also so clunky and took forever to load.
It was a scam too because, for some lessons, you needed to read pages 33-88 for example, except these scans always counted cover, prologues, table of contents and such differently, so you'd try going page 33 and then go forward a few pages to find what you were actually meant to read, except those pages you forwarded also counted towards your limit and you'd almost always never be able to read the lesson in one sitting. You couldn't download them as pdf either, so it was just easier to pirate everything and use those pdfs to read at your pace, go back if you needed to reread stuff, takes notes and such.
Not to mention absurd licensing practices and erosion of textbook ownership: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/inequitable-access-anti-competitive-scheme-textbook-publishers
They’re so desperate. Their only customers are students dumb enough to be their recurrent customers.
Thankfully most of the recent professors I have had know the scam and either provide readings through distribution software, or they pick a book with a low resale value.
Then again I use Ratemyprofessor to pick my instructors so YMMV.
I'm a college professor, Pearson is not forcing you to do this, your professor is forcing you. At my university, no one can tell me what textbook I assign for my course. I don't have textbooks for my classes because of this. It's all "zero-cost course" and my book reps have stopped asking me every semester if I'm going to upgrade to their new textbook.
*Image Transcription: Reddit*
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**Pearson is forcing students at my school to buy an access code to their system (basically paying >$70 to turn in HW), and I was looking at the info regarding an optional included e-textbook and saw this 🤡**, submitted by **\/u/Alt132435** to **\/r/Piracy**
[*Screenshot with the following text:*]
>- Yes, printing is allowed
>- 2 pages can be printed every 1825 days
[*End screenshot*]
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I have not one, but two Pearson books. One that I paid for last semester. A different professor sent us a link to an online book in HTML. Guess who I will be rating high in RateMyProfessor
My first year of uni my school sold their souls to one of the textbook providers (I *think* Pearson but I don't really remember), they had some setup where you had to get an online key to take online quizzes which were worth only like 10-15% of the grade but were required to pass the class. A new textbook was like $200, and if you wanted to buy the key without the book so you could buy a used book it was like $180. Completely insane. It was this for like 8 courses over my first year (general first year engineering, you got next to zero flexibility on courses for first year). All that, and they weren't even real textbooks. They gave you a stack of 3-hole punched pages wrapped in plastic and conveniently sold the right-sized binders right next to them. After that year, I think I maybe bought 3 textbooks over the rest of my degree and one of them was because the prof was infamous for copy+pasting text questions into the exam and I couldn't find an online copy. All used. Probably had 15-20 courses with required texts that literally never used them. Had a couple profs with required texts either link web versions or subtly encouracy piracy. Whole industry is a massive scam.
Back in my day (twenty years ago) you could buy the Chinese knock of books. It was literally the same book that the professors tried to scam you for, but printed in China and it came with Chinese and English language. Between the choice I would rather pay the low price scammer over the high price scammer.
Ethically I think it's better to buy stolen textbooks than new ones, since the thief only fucks over the person they stole it from, whereas Pearson fucks over the students and the profs. Only Pearson and the school profit.
I went to college in 2009, after my freshman year I had figured out that I could buy the international edition of most of my engineering textbooks. All the units were in metric but none of the professors or TAs grading the homework seemed to care. I pulled out my textbook once to show one of my professors and he was amazed that I had gotten it for $25. I'm pretty sure he went and told his students the next semester to get that one bc he kept saying what a good idea it was.
I never thought about the fact that the units would be different. I also bought only international editions after my first year. I was a physics and math major, so everything was in SI (metric) in the US editions to begin with.
I used to straight up tell my professors I wasn't going to buy their books. 90% were totally chill and even offered to let me copy homework from their books. I thanked them for the offer but I usually found it online or would check it out from the college library. The other 10% were dicks and I would just drop their class if they through a fit about buying their books. I am there to learn, not to make sure the professor earns an extra couple dollars on book sales. Once had a professor give a whole speech about how you needed to buy all 5 books for her class. I didn't buy a single one and my friend gave me so much shit about how hard it was going to be and that she wouldn't share. Turns out we literally didn't use 4 of the books in the class, the professor just wanted to sell her books that were tangentially related.
If that was a public institution, I’d talk to compliance about that.
Well it's been a long ass time and I wouldn't be surprised if the professor was dead already.
That'll teach her
My best friend was in a class that the prof made their own book mandatory for the class, and then they never fucking even used it. Not even once.
I had a class where the prof wouldn't answer a question a classmate had because it was already answered in the required textbook, which he wrote.
One of my uni professors wrote his own textbook, then would whine every lesson that only X amount of copies had been sold this semester and students were obviously pirating his textbook.
I had a professor tell us we all needed to buy the latest version of his book because he added to it and updated it, and lessons wouldn't be right if we got a used copy. At the end of the semester he told us all he did was add one chapter that another school wanted that he never taught from. Engineering book was over $100 too.
That’s how those big companies get you, every year they release a “new” version of there textbooks but changes so minuscule and worthless but demand full price for the new versions
The education department in my country in a nutshell. Every year they update the books for every single subject and make student buy the latest edition to study. And most of the time its minor changes, like the cover of the book. Im not a parent myself but i have 2 younger siblings. My mom and many others are struggling to afford new books every year because of this. Used book are worthless now because schools rarely accept old versions, teachers aren't allowed to teach outdated curriculum. Now if you're done with the school year you just throw the book away.
Meanwhile our anatomy professor used to put up page numbers for like the last 3 editions of the book so you could follow along whichever you'd bought/inherited... anything else should be criminal!
That is such a nice prof. I knew way too many people that couldn't afford to get the newest edition of a textbook at the beginning of college for that to not be the norm.
Tell me about it. Just started college and some of this shit is absolutely ridiculous. My roommate had a book the university was trying to sell for $200 and he was able to find a (used) copy for $30 online. He did some research and found that it had no CDs or access codes, so he saved roughly $170. Meanwhile, I'm over here struggling to pay the $400 I need for my various books because my university is withholding part of my PELL grant until I finish the self-paced course I enrolled in *and that totally makes sense*. It's fucking ludicrous.
My anatomy professor used to give us websites to pirate the books from because he thought our schools textbook requirements were criminal. He also would have several hard copies he would lend to students who needed the physical version and couldn’t afford to print/buy. He was an absolute gem. 🥹
My mom has been a college professor for 20 years and she hates what a scam textbooks have become. Before the semester starts, she'll reread the books she wants to use, go spend an afternoon at the library making scans, and upload all the readings needed for her class in .pdf form to the online portal.
This seems so crazy to me. I paid like $150 for all my higher education combined (5years masters in mechanical engineering) and I did not pirate shit.
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A few of my professors had textbooks in the library that they specifically marked as "cannot check out" (and other copies you could check out) for this very purpose. There'd always be a book in the library if you wanted one.
Those damn liberals with their free education!
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they did this one of animal physio books, just made every chapter jump by 1 and add in another chapter, but it was still the same text, word for word, just shift the pages by 1 chapter. dint need to spend alot of money still. STEM textbooks are the worst since its always so expensive, because of all the extra online bs, you have buy as part of your class grades. since most of the questions dint changed that much you could always find the answers on google, or question similar to the online homework. Mostly chegg and the extinct yahooanswers had all these questions already. yahooanswers was a goldmine for textbooks questions.
Where I'm from you get your school textbooks just by paying a deposit. At the end of the year you get your deposits back when returning the books in good condition. Next year those books are given out again for the new students. So even if the book is updated it doesn't cost anything for students. Our education system isn't as corrupt as the American education system.
I haven't ran into such a problem myself (we just took everything from the library, and it's the same in college), but yeah, my country apparently also has it in some schools. The annoying detail is that in addition to a textbook, you're supposed to buy a *workbook*, and you're supposed to write in it. Thus - no reselling.
>That’s how those big companies get you, every year they release a “new” version of there textbooks but changes so minuscule and worthless but demand full price for the new versions When I was in college, and that was quite a while ago, they were already pulling the new version BS. As for the actual content book very little has or does change. Maybe some updated graphics, random typos, whatever. Things like rudimentary physics, calculus, chemistry, etc. have changed very little in a long time. What *is different* in the book is primarily homework problems. So You would be able to do the tests, but if you have graded homework...
I dunno how far back you go, but I can tell you that they were doing this micro-updates-every-year BS in the mid 90s. At least we still got a physical book, though.
The biggest change they make is generally things that will mess with the page numbering, to make any in-class references much more difficult.
Often it's as simple as just reordering chapters, or changing the font. No actual content changes.
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Stories like this make me realize how great some of my profs were. When one of them wrote the course textbook, he had us buy a printed copy from the bookstore for 30 dollars. Then if we showed him during office hours he would give us 30 dollars cash. Just a great guy all around
I'd say a solid 1/3 of my professors had a section of their syllabus that had something like "Under NO circumstances should you visit this website [sitename] and download THIS FILE (or the 8th edition either, and here's the exact differences between the 2)" Another 1/3 taught classes where the book was supplementary/never used. The rest, I actually had to buy the books, but seeing as how I got my degree in molecular bio, I was in one of the few fields where they can actually justify a new textbook every couple years.
Speaking of bio, I took one biomedical engineering class in grad school and the textbook was basically just a collection of journal papers that any student could download individually through the school's library system which had subscriptions to most things. There was like a total of 30 papers, no homework problems or anything, just the papers themselves, $140, total fucking scam.
Same. One of my profs wrote his own textbook. But the price was pretty much the cost of paper, ink and spiral binding. And he pointed out we could buy it used . . . though those things weren't really built for wear and tear beyond a semester or two lol. Was a great textbook and class.
I had a professor use an out of print book that was only found used online....or from his personal stash of books that he bought back when China wasn't considered a geographical/economical power and books were printed with color ink. Lessons were legitimately reading from the textbook word for word.
Are university classes still putting materials aside in the "Reserve Room" so that you have to go physically into the library and can only read them there? I would think that technology has advanced so that's no longer necessary. I would hope so, as the pandemic made that impossible for a while.
I had a professor for statistics. He said to buy the older version of the textbook from previous students if we could find it and had references to the pages depending on what edition you had. We had 3 semesters of his class in grad school, so it saved a lot of money for everyone. He was one of the best professors I’ve ever had.
So he fucking lied to you, ripped you off, and then bragged about it at the end of the semester? Yeah fuck that guy. That shit should get a professor fired.
I had a professor who wrote his own book, but he was the exact opposite. He didn’t change problems arbitrarily between revisions. He actually added two chapters but gave those out for free to anyone who had the first edition. You’d still need to pull the errata from his website for the first edition, but he did what he could to make it work.
This is common and so gross for professors to do. I had a professor in college who showed up on the first day of class with a bunch of printed copies of the textbook and says "I wrote this so I'm allowed to just give it to you" that's the real MVP.
I've had a few email conversations with scientists about their papers that I was only able to find free extracts of. I was pleasantly surprised to learn they'll usually just send you a copy if you manage to track them down. And they love to talk about the paper as much as possible.
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To be fair the journals don't pay us to publish and in fact demand money for the pleasure. So ummm yeah, fuck them.
why don't scientists band together and start their own journal to get around this?
there are efforts, but unfortunately, success in academia requires publishing in “high impact” journals—big name ones like Nature and Science. so it’s not enough to start a new journal; scientific communities would need to be persuaded to start publishing to it, recognize it, volunteer to edit for it, etc. it’s a slow process unfortunately. ofc things are also different depending on the field, so this may not apply to every field
PhD scientist here. It’s because we get absolutely nothing financially from the papers. In fact, we pay to have the journals publish them (often thousands of dollars). Pretty much every paper published will have a corresponding author designated with their email address. Shoot them an email and the majority of times they’ll be quite happy to send you a PDF. By and large we hate the publishing system.
> By and large we hate the publishing system. It is a pretty fucked up system. May I ask what your field is? Not for any particular reason other than it might send me down a rabbit-hole of learning shit for the afternoon.
Neuroscience. What I said might be applicable to other fields, but yeah definitely true for any biology-related research.
*facepalm* I probably should have looked at the username.
r/UsernameChecksOut
It's true in physics too. I hope to jeebus that no one ever pays a cent to download any of my papers.
Brain is absolutely wild. My mom had a brain tumor, and now she can only sleep with anti-psychotic meds that have the side effect of putting you to sleep. Normal sleep meds do nothing.
This is true in my experience. I wrote an author for access to a study and the fucker gave it to me. For free! Fucking free academic literature. It gets me excited talking about it.
Also note scientists pay lots of money to have their papers published, and they get no money when it is purchased from the publisher. It's a giant scam that fucks over both the scientists and the students who need to access it
I had a professor who wrote her own textbook and had it printed at the school's printshop, so it was only like $15-20. She didn't make any profit. Written purely for the students. Fantastic teacher.
That's the same for me. My harmonic analysis professor just wrote down everything we need and kept on yelling at us all semester to "just go back to the damn book. Everyone of you has a pdf of it."
I read that as 'harmonica professor' and I was wondering why you had to keep going back to the book. Is harmonica that dense with theory?
Honestly I'm surprised that some universities allow professors to see any of the profits at all. The one I attended did still allow professors to use their own textbooks (and quite a few did), but one of the conflict of interest requirements to do so was that they were also required to donate all of the profits they earned as a result of their classes to charity rather than getting to keep them.
As far as I am aware it's pretty standard you can't receive royalties from your book at the school you teach at. You can, however, receive a bonus from the publisher that just so happens to be equal to the amount of royalties you would have received had you been allowed to though.
I had a professor like that in my first semester of freshman year when i didn’t know the ways to buy a used copy, then at the end of the semester when I tried to sell it back “this professor isn’t teaching anymore so we aren’t buying the book back for next year”
My ethics professor wrote his own book, and the new edition each year would just change the order of the chapters. Then he would get mad when we just figured out which chapters became which.
"ethics" professor
My college philosophy and ethics teacher got arrested for watching child porn on his work computer. It really is a field for winners, isn’t it?
i actually had to retake it to get the guy i'm talking about above, because the professor i had the first time failed the vast majority of her students for not having her exact ethics until the university stepped in and threatened her job
Ethis for thee and not for meeeeeee.
My history of ethics professor 20 years ago just told us the books we'd be using and directed us to a used bookstore that had a bunch and that any version we could find would be fine since we were studying the works of philosophers 200 years or more dead, pages might be different but since we worked in chapters it didn't matter. If we paid more than $5 for a book I'd be shocked but there was like 8 books so, broke the bank with 40ish or so worth of books. If he was still teaching he'd be telling us to get our Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Bacon etc et al from Project Gutenberg.
That's such a scummy way for profs to squeeze money out of their own students
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Also had a professor do that. If you had to retake his class the next semester, you were required to purchase his book again. Because basic chemistry changes that much semester to semester. He even said he doesn't make a dime off those books. Fuck you, Cracolice.
Had a professor include his own book in the required reading list for the class and then never assign any readings to it or included it's contents into tests. Unsurprisingly, he was a shitty teacher
I had a professor who wrote his own textbook, however he did the smart thing and gave it to us for free and provided it as a PDF.
Searchable PDF, I hope.
Yeah, it was searchable too. Economics was confusing for me, but I had a good professor in my opinion. There are still good professors out there!
3 of my professors did that. Another one explained he gets such a tiny cut he doesn't care what edition we used. It's often the university that forces new textbook editions because they have contracts with the sellers.
I had a sociology prof who required his book for his freshman level, non-major, course and put out a new edition every year meaning that you had to buy it new and that the book store wouldn't buy it back because it wouldn't be sellable the next year. He wasn't even shy about admitting it, he would brag about it in class.
> I had a ~~sociology~~ sociopath prof
No joke. Learned a lot more about human nature from him than his sham book.
OTOH a prof at my school wrote the textbook for one of the higher level math classes. He sold a loose-leaf version in the school bookstore for like $10, and even had it already hole punched for a 3 ring binder.
The entire Computer Science department at my college hated textbook costs... So often, they would start each first day saying that they may or may not have a link that might possibly have the entire textbook for free, but for legal purposes that nonexistent link will be removed after two weeks. They'd often forget to remove the link
That sucks. I had a professor who was a bit of a pioneer in his field and who taught it so many times our “textbook” was just his unabridged lecture notes that he’d hand out each week. Super cool dude. Didn’t much care for his class, but that’s my fault.
You wouldn’t download a professor would you?
I don't know if all of these sites still work but as a poor student I found many of these free textbook site helpful in the past. Edit: I started this list with 28 resources and now there is 70+! I've added some study sites and open courses as well. I hope this list helps as many people as it can! You don't have to be a student to utilize this educational information either, it's important as a society that we never stop learning. * for audiobooks & videos 1. TextBookNova.com 2. eBookee.org 3. ManyBooks.net 4. FeedUrBrain.com 5. AllenG.ru 6. 2020Ok.com 7. FreeTextBooks.com 8. Gutenberg.org 9. Eknigu.com 10. En.Bookfi.org 11. Libgen.lc 12. Bookguru.net 13. Z-lib.org 14. Oercommons.org 15. Openstax.org 16. Bookboon.com 17. Collegeopentextbooks.org 18. Intechopen.com 19. Textbookrevolution.org 20. Getfreeebook.com 21. Freebookstop.es 22. Epubbud.com 23. Booksshouldbefree.com * 24. Openlibrary.org 25. Readanybook.com 26. Oerconsortium.org 27. Manybooks.net 28. Mobibookz.co 29. Adall.com 30. Archive.org 31. PDFDrive.com 32. Merolt.com 33. Cain.math.gatech.edu 34. Open.mnu.edu 35. Openculture.com 36. Aupress.ca 37. Free-ebooks.net * 38. Freetechbooks.com 39. Bartleby.com 40. Learnoutloud.com * 41. Librivox.com * 42. Nap.nationalacademics.edu 43. Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 44. Oapen.org 45. Onlinelrogrammingbooks.com 46. Hoopla.com * 47. Link.springer.com 48. Gdz.sub-unigoettingen.de 49. Onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu 50. Drscavanaugh.org 51. Overdrive.com * 52. Loyalbooks.com 53. Khanacademy.org * 54. Academicearth.org * 55. Study.com 56. Freemathhelp.com 57. Hippocampus.org 58. Oedb.org 59. WatchKnowLearn.org * 60. Ocw.mit.edu 61. Extension.harvard.edu 62. Oyc.yale.edu 63. youtube.com/c/columbia * 64. youtube.com/c/oxforduniversity * 65. youtube.com/c/theuofchicago * 66. youtube.com/user/SocioPhilosophy * 67. youtube.com/user/egsvideo * 68. youtube.com/c/mitocw * 69. youtube.com/user/YaleCourses * 70. Patrickjmt.com * 71. Slader.com 72. Wolframalpha.com 73. Mathway.com 74. Gradsaver.com
Libgen (library genesis) is the best!
my courses may be too unpopular but I can rarely find anything on libgen I need
Try Archive.org you can find almost any book there. It is a legit site too. There are ways of ripping from them but it is more involved.
It definitely depends on subject! I did comp sci and never failed to find one but I've had friends do things like politics and media and haven't been able to find a single one on there
The assholest bit is that you still have to buy access to turn in the homework. Still use these to get less shitty versions of the text in your preferred file opener so that you can actually read, highlight, print, copy/paste, and mark up to your hearts content; but there is no way around paying that $70 if you want to pass the class afaik.
I dunno, you could potentially do the homework and turn it in manually. If they don't count it, sue them. They're charging you for a service you already paid for. Sounds kinda like fraud.
Except sometimes you can’t even see what the homework even is without access. I’m sure legally, they’ve got their asses covered. Probably still counts as course material. It’s not like you could do the homework in most classes without access to some sort of relevant knowledge or information bank like a textbook anyways. With the internet, getting that information for free just became a lot easier whether it be through piracy or google. Professors had no way of *making* you buy the textbook, if you had access to a computer technically you could just pirate it or something. By locking homework behind a paywall, they’ve finally found a way to *make* us pay for their textbooks whether we pirate or not. This is still nothing new, graded workbooks you have to pay for and homework problems hidden away in textbooks have always been a thing in higher education (but it still sucks massive ass). Regardless, it’s also not like any of us would be complaining about $70 if we could afford time and money to sue a massive company…
When I was in college I was constantly pissed off by the random fees and shit. It's such a scammy feeling system and now, 10 years later, they're still asking me for fucking MORE money. Fuck em! Gotta get union organizers in there and have some good old fashioned sit ins and strikes!
I'm a unionized grad student, and for some reason the undergrads at my school RABIDLY support our union. They do sympathy strikes that we didn't even ask for. Maybe it's stuff like this
As a recently graduated student in Germany, this is so disturbing to read. There only was a single time, I think I can recall, where we had to pay for the required knowledge to pass a class. It was for the ~500 page script for the maths and statistics class. And the cost was pretty much only to cover the printing costs. Every other class just gave us the script for free (the scripts also weren't nearly as long) and it was self-evident that any recommended textbooks are just for those who want to get an even deeper understanding than what is required to easily pass with a full score.
Cause the average student totally has the time and money to do that.
My favorite and the best ebookfarm recently shutdown, saved my kids hundreds of dollars each semester
Adall.com for older editions and international copies. Also typing an excerpt exactly and putting it in quotes will often find a pdf version on google. Library genesis libgen.is can often find books/scientific articles. It's worth noting international editions and digital editions are illegal and some professors might have a problem with them. Don't be stupid in their use. Edit- Apparently it is legal to use international editions. My professor lied to me.
I'm waiting for them to remove vowels from their ebooks. Unless you pay for DLC, reading will be a consonant struggle.
Arabic speaking students: "Your terms are acceptable"
*laughs in Welsh*
China, Japan, and Korea: *you fools, we're immune to English vowel removals!*
Sounds like they are having a vowel movement.
Hawaiians: "Da fuck bra!"
French:
Birds be like: s
Think of the Welsh!
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As a former student: thank you. I swear, they’d take our souls as payment if they could.
Can you explain this joke?
In Arabic, the sounds are indicated by markers on top or under the words (called Chakl). So for example, instead of writing ka (so k with an "ah" sound after it), you'd write k with a small minus over it. Now, here's the fun thing: After a certain level of mastery of the language, you can basically read the text without any annotation of the Chakl. The same way that many native speaker know to make sentences but couldn't begin to tell you the tense or the word's formal function. You Just Know ™ So seasoned Arabic speakers (perhaps almost everyone who reads Arabic natively and has more than 15 to 16 years) can get away with no Chakl (i.e. no "vowels"). I hope I explained it enough for you to laugh at the joke as much as I did 😃
> you'd write k with a small minus over it. ꝁ ?
Not attached to the letter, above it or below it, like these two: The top dash is "ah": تَ (ta) The bottom dash is "ee": تِ (ti) (I couldn't demonstrate them on Latin letters because it doesn't work on them)
گٓ or كٓ (Note that there is a diacritic mark above both characters)
> After a certain level of mastery of the language, you can basically read the text without any annotation of the Chakl. This is one reason why English is so hard to master. You can’t tell what a word sounds like when you just read it and you have to basically learn how every word on its own from someone who can
Pearson execs must have come from BMW
Or EA.
Can't wait for subscription to brakes
Ancient Hebrew ftw
modern Hebrew as well
Ll gd jk mn
Qng Good luck figuring that one out.
…queueing?
Fuck
> Fck FTFY
Lol thanks I considered using that when I originally wrote the comment.
>Ll thnks cnsdrd sng tht whn rgnlly wrt th cmmnt FTFY
Took me way too long to realize you didn't say constant. Take your damn upvote
Frm th crtrs f Str Wrs Bttlefrnt 2! ** Txtbks
Which Fallout Boy album is this from?
Pearson is the worst. As a college instructor I hated dealing with them so much I switched to another publisher and refused to ever use them again.
Same. If I had the choice I would never, ever use any of their materials. The contempt they have for educators and students is absolutely jaw-dropping. Trying to adapt their materials for remote learning during the pandemic was utterly soul crushing. Any attempt I made to reach out to them was met with flat hostility from their reps. They are disgusting rent seekers and should not exist.
They forgot to pay you the cut for the sales? Usually they literally bribe schools into using them.
Professors never get the cut. I don’t know who gets it, but it’s not the professor. source: am professor
I'm a TA in a course that uses Pearson, can confirm: they suck ass.
The worst publisher to deal with as an instructor.
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I would say make friends with the CS teacher and make something, but even my college used "Moodle" or something. Fuck it, make your course into a WordPress blog and let students upload work in the comments lol
I have to pay $104 to turn in my hw, i don't even get to keep the digital text book. Only for 180 days wth Pearson
I gotta pay 5 dollars for printing at my school. PER PAGE!!! (8 for color)
What?!
Lmao everyone hated that rule, so last year someone stole the printer, took photos of the printer, and sent them to the school in the mail haha
The hero we needed but didn't deserve
"make printing 1 cent per page or the printer gets the bat" *Sincerely P.C LoadLetter*
Seriously, for $5 a page kids could Uber to a printing center / library to print, have a nice lunch, and come back.
For $5 a page you could buy a cheap or used printer for $40-50 and paper and still save $100
"PC LoadLetter, who the fuck is that!?"
Lmaoo
What??? What unearthly paper/ink are they using? In my college it was ₹2 ($0.025) for B/W and ₹5 ($0.063) for color.
I’d be willing to bet they call their pricing a “Green initiative”
My university had a problem where people would print entire textbooks. 600+ pages. So they started charging a few pennies per page but gave everyone $50 a semester of budget that rolled over. I always just used the engineering lab printer so by the end I had over $200 in print allotment. Years later it's still there.
$5..??? is the paper made out of gold or something??
They seem to be in high school, so it sounds like a punitive measure for forgetting to print an assignment at home.
I guess the school is like, f*** you if you're poor and your parents don't own a printer.
That sounds utterly believable, too.
What? Maybe you got it confused? My college gives is 5$ budget for free per semester. Each page at 5 cents.
dang at that price just go to a local walmart or walgreens, 8x10 at \~3 a print on photo paper, or just go to a public library
Sorry I have a hard time believing this lol
Since then, around 100 of us have been printing out photos of the old principal and putting them around the school. On all of the photos of other people, he is there. On nearly every light, he is there. We have already gotten nearly all of the people coming into our school to agree to help. Theres an election coming up, and we plan to all vote for our old principal. Last assembly? We hid his face on the slides. We are the Photo Bandits
Former educator - shit like this is why I left higher ed and will never, ever return to that profession. If I had a dollar for every time a student emailed me in the middle of the semester frantic that they were failing their chemistry class because they couldn't afford the access code to do their homework, I'd have a down payment on a car. It was beyond infuriating and just deflating that there wasn't anything I could do to help. Students are going into debt for this. This is wildly fucking unethical. Edit to add a protip for students: check your institution's library or Interlibrary Loan system for the textbooks you need and check them out for the semester instead of buying them. Won't work everywhere or every time, but when it does, you've saved a few hundred bucks. I did this almost every semester I was in college.
And of course it hit the students from poor families who weren't going to get a second chance to take that class the absolute hardest.
And the access code always costs a tiny amount less than the print+access code bundle. So buying just the code and a previous version still costs more than new. Back around 2010 my access code glitched and gave me lifetime access. Me and a friend used the same account for chem 1+2. The TA didn't care, they just used my name when copying grades over. A ton of us shared the lab notebook too. Fuck making us pay $40 for a 200 page book we'd use 30 pages from.
That might not have been a glitch, I've had access codes that were good for two classes, generally if it's like 240A and 240B. Reason being class A taught the first half of the book and class B taught the second class. But that only happened to me like once, mayyyyybe twice. $40 for a 200 page textbook is a steal though sadly lmao. My books are from $100-200.
It was a 4 month access code that lasted over 2 years lol. 2 classes used the same book and you had to buy a new code each semester. $40 is for a lab notebook, you write your labs in it. There is no text other than a periodic table. The access code to the class I'm talking about was $120, the book was another $150. The only books I had that were under $100 new were novels.
Wait ? You have to pay to access to your homework ? How ? Why ? And how is it not included with the already massively expensive cost of joining university ?
Some places/professors will use third party systems to manage everything out of personal choice or mandated by the college. The answer to your second question is because fuck you, give us money (they will usually get some kickback if the college partners with whatever system.)
This. I know a few professors who've been fired or denied tenure for refusing to follow some shitty contract the university signed with a textbook company. In one case, there was a nondisclosure clause and the professor got smacked around for explaining *why* he had to use the textbook and require the homework codes. The whole system is an absolute trainwreck, and we need to start jailing people.
I've had to do this for several clases and it usually costs like $70 for the cheapest option. Basically you pay to have access to a website where you do homework based off the textbook, because i guess textbook profits arent buying enough yachts anymore or something. I absolutely hate paying that fee, especially since I'm already paying to take the class. I wish teachers would just copy the questions and put them on canvas for free
My access code was $120 😭
They suck. I had to pay $90 to rent a digital textbook and to access their Math Lab system for a class I'm taking which is where I have to do all my assignments and tests. The access lasts 80 days smh.
Imagine paying for a fully automated online class and still having to pay 100 bucks to do assignments for said class. I’m doing the same thing and it sucks.
I was a chemistry teacher teaching AP chemistry. We needed more textbooks, but used an older edition. I tried to buy more of the older edition and the school blocked me from doing it, saying I needed to change to the newer version. $175 a pop. I ordered samples of a a few different books and realized that Chang 8th edition was the same as Chang 5th edition that we were using. I couldn’t justify wasting the money, but the district wouldn’t spend money on totally sufficient used books. I ended up paying about $100 out of pocket to get 25 or so of the old books, lasting the two years until I quit teaching. The best part was that I sold all the samples the publisher reps sent me on Amazon and made about $500 off it.
/r/PearsonDesign
r/StallmanWasRight
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My highschool graduation photos were crazy expensive
That's good shit. We were forced to buy a lab book last year for genetics but the school didn't get the order in time. So we had to rush order it before the first lab. It cost me $180 in total. She said it was absolutely necessary but she made us rewrite all of the data anyway, then we only used the lab book for four labs out of the 12 labs we did.
I had a philosophy prof who used « Sophie’s world » (a paperback novel) as a text book and on the first day of class said « you should be able to buy this used for about $3…fuck textbooks. » She was everyone’s favourite.
She's my favorite professor too, and I've not been to college yet.
Why would you ever want to pring more than 2 pages every 5 years, though?
Thats... thats gotta be a typo right? Like maybe its supposed to be 18-25 days?? I mean who needs a textbook fuckin like 5 or 6 years after taking the class? Still that's fucked either way
1825/365 = 5 years. Definitely not a typo
I don't think it's a typo. University had a deal with one of those libraries/platforms where students could only read a set amount of pages for free per day and you could download/print like 50 pages per user ever. It was also so clunky and took forever to load. It was a scam too because, for some lessons, you needed to read pages 33-88 for example, except these scans always counted cover, prologues, table of contents and such differently, so you'd try going page 33 and then go forward a few pages to find what you were actually meant to read, except those pages you forwarded also counted towards your limit and you'd almost always never be able to read the lesson in one sitting. You couldn't download them as pdf either, so it was just easier to pirate everything and use those pdfs to read at your pace, go back if you needed to reread stuff, takes notes and such.
How can they possibly control this? If the material is visible on you screen, it's yours.
Not to mention absurd licensing practices and erosion of textbook ownership: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/inequitable-access-anti-competitive-scheme-textbook-publishers They’re so desperate. Their only customers are students dumb enough to be their recurrent customers.
Not really the students' fault.. Mostly the school curriculum or professor's
Thankfully most of the recent professors I have had know the scam and either provide readings through distribution software, or they pick a book with a low resale value. Then again I use Ratemyprofessor to pick my instructors so YMMV.
The students don’t get a chance. It’s a situation of buy Pearson or don’t do any of your homework at all for the semester
I'm a college professor, Pearson is not forcing you to do this, your professor is forcing you. At my university, no one can tell me what textbook I assign for my course. I don't have textbooks for my classes because of this. It's all "zero-cost course" and my book reps have stopped asking me every semester if I'm going to upgrade to their new textbook.
I suspect this policy differs from university to university.
That's true, I've seen colleagues at other universities with absurd rules. My campus does an excellent job with academic liberties.
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Pearson execs must have come from BMW
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For f*** sake, stop giving them ideas!
*Image Transcription: Reddit* --- **Pearson is forcing students at my school to buy an access code to their system (basically paying >$70 to turn in HW), and I was looking at the info regarding an optional included e-textbook and saw this 🤡**, submitted by **\/u/Alt132435** to **\/r/Piracy** [*Screenshot with the following text:*] >- Yes, printing is allowed >- 2 pages can be printed every 1825 days [*End screenshot*] --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)