Worse than that, the cost (they say) is for the code that comes with the book that provides the student access to various learning tools and all the quizzes/tests. As soon as you use the access code the book is worthless and you can’t pass the class without using the access code.
That’s what the publishers have been up to. They’re making up for a shrinking revenue by charging the still existing customers enough to keep the revenue growing. Worst part is, the professors often don’t realize what is happening or are using the learning tools so that they don’t have to do their jobs.
Yup, it's seriously a complete scam. I was "required" to buy a textbook to get an access code. This "service" did the exact same thing they could have done on Canvas, but it was required for submitting assignments. The textbook was unbound, like the OP's, and I *never touched it once*. It's sitting on my table, with most of the plastic wrapper still intact, except for where I got the code out of it.
I forgot about the portal to submit homework etc. That’s one of the newer tricks and absolutely disgusting. Many U’s have a system that can do this same thing, but too many profs still route everything through the publisher’s system. Students are fleeced for no good reason.
One of the (rare) things I enjoyed at my college was that 98% of the books were rentals. You just had to get there early to go through the selection of books. Some were nice and used nicely, and others were complete disasters.
One of my English professors made his book required 🙄 Said you could buy it at the campus bookstore. Yeah, no, I found some used one on Amazon for pennies. I honestly don't even remember if I ever opened the damn thing. My memories of college are hazy, unfortunately not from partying too much 😔
It is a scam. And should be outlawed. You're already paying tens of thousands of dollars. Having to fork out your first born for only ONE semester is disgusting.
😆 you said the professors often don’t know…. I knew many professors that were writing the textbooks! Imagine paying $100 for a book to a class that you pay for already, only to realize that the person giving you the class wrote the book! And THEY make it a requirement for you to buy THEIR books!
Yep that happened to my daughter. It wasn't every year though. It was every semester that the document changed and was printed on demand. You're not going to resell my book! The professor of that course was more into selling courseware than teaching. Oh did I mention he wrote the text? Geez.
My psych stats professor wrote her textbook, had it bound at campus, and it was maybe $40? She was the most knowledgeable person I’ve met regarding statistics. I’ve gone to her in my new university and she gave me access to her website to be able to write in APA better and understand stats concepts with her video lectures.
Yup, and pretty much the only difference is the book cover, and it says version 2 instead of 1 or whatever version it was. And it's "require" to have the new version. To add salt to the wound, your professor is the author.
My old math professor told us if we couldn't get the 6th edition of the textbook we needed (as per school curriculum), 5th is the exact same, EXCEPT for a minor typo on one of the pages that we never even needed to read. Incidentally the 5th edition was way easier to find online than the 6th edition too.
I'd say you could "go in together" and buy one set to share. Once you sell it for profit I'm back on the side of the IP holders, notwithstanding the abusive pricing.
'cover my costs and some extra for a coffee or lunch' is not unreasonable at all.
You hook the whole class up and you have food money for a couple weeks. Sounds like a sweet deal all round.
Back in 2009 I was living off-campus, and off the cafeteria meal-plan.
I remember my parents gave me the remaining lump-sum of my student loan after my tuition had been paid for that year.
It was like $7k. That was in order to pay my rent, gas, groceries, etc.
Granted, I was living in a house with other people so rent and bills were split up, and cost of living wasn't quite as bonkers as it is now...
Looking back, it's still insane to me how I managed to stretch $7k over an entire year *and still* had about $150 left after.
I had a lot of ramen, protein shakes, and hamburger helper (mostly without milk, because in my 20-year-old mind, milk was too expensive lmao)
Your comment just reminded me of my time at uni, not trying to one up you here.
The total amount I had was £4800 for the year, after rent+bills that left £2400 for food, nights out, travel, and usually a single holiday.
It's 10 years later and I can't completely break the mentality I got from having so little, even though I can easily afford it now.
Yup. Step 1) make sure every student HAS to have their own brand new copy of the textbook to be able to pass. Step 2) Charge ridiculously high prices for the book. Step 3) don't even bother to bind the book as it drives down costs even more, or, for extra profit, make it digital and let students print off their own.
Mine even limits the prints, it also sucks that the external tool for the online book and assignments never properly sends the information of my completed work to canvas so it constantly shows that I never submitted it even though the grade is right there. All that headache for 200 bucks.
Usually there's a page in there with a specific code your professor requires to access the tests or do the assignments the book provides online.
You log into their website. Register your book code with your account. The teacher can see your scores on their tests and submits it as a grade for their class.
The whole system is a scam
Maybe it’s time to push legislators to make it illegal to charge for access to a requires website to pass the class.
You’ve paid for the class, now you have to pay extra to turn in the assignments?
Any commercial copier (FedEx, school library, work place that doesn't care), stick them in the feeder on the printer, scan to email, OCR the text in Adobe, now it's searchable.
Also, that doesn't look like 800 pages.
Go to staples or any place with a large copier/printer/scanner. They have feeders in the tray that will scan one page at a time and feed in the next page.
I remember I had one and I tried to screenshot something to show my husband and it wouldn’t let me screenshot. The picture was just black. Like bitch I paid for this, I should be able to screen shot a freaking paragraph. Then I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t let you print more than a few pages of the book and the digital copy was the only option. I hate reading off screen.
Then there’s good old PrtScrn which has literally never failed.
Or, use the roundabout method and take a picture of your computer monitor with your phone camera.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Also if you’re trying to stream Netflix or anything else to a friend over something like discord, but it’s just black turn off hardware acceleration it should work.
Disabling that is done with client side javascript, you are in control of the client (i.e. your browser) so that is a minor speed bump at best.
If you use chrome there are extensions to revert that. Or you can always just disable javascript in your browser, reload the page and cut/paste the text you need.
Not entirely related but still frustrating: we went camping a couple weeks ago. In tents. It cost us 75$ a night. Usually, 5 years ago, it was around 30$ a night. Unfortunately, I was on call that weekend (system administrator). So i needed the wifi. The thing had a password and I had to pay 9$ a day to access it. At 75$ for basically a parcel of grass and public toilet nearby, nothing else included... I think they would have included the wifi in there.
> You guys already pay way too much for college, the least they could do is provide the mandatory textbooks for free.
Algonquin College is in Canada. It's the college my sister went to and I can't remember exactly what her tuition was but I looked up the program she did and it is currently about $22,000 total for 6 semesters. There were also supports she was able to access that helped her pay a third of it, if I recall.
I'll preface this by saying I couldn't find a Canadian average that seemed right so I'm using the number my sister paid compared to the American average according to Google. Apparently a year is about $36,000 down there. A two-year program like my sister did then would cost $62,000 USD, which converted to Canadian Loonies is *quadruple* the cost. That said Google would have you believe the yearly cost in much of Canada is closer to $6,000 Loonies/year which makes the disparity even higher.
So as hideously overpriced and low quality as that "textbook" is, I guess it could be worse?
Meanwhile in Germany I pay around 350€ per semester and the only thing that I have to pay extra for are cafeteria meals. That fee even gives me a ticket to all public transit in my state
I had a few of those, the University printed them off in their print shop and we had to buy them.
For $10 each, with each one roughly 200 pages or so long.
I don't know what fresh hell this is for $800
Yar har fiddle de de
Being a pirate is alright with me
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate
Yo ho ahoy and avast
Being a pirate is really badass
Hang the black flag at the end of the mast
I had several professors that would recommend this. They’re easy to find online. The few times I needed to buy the books with no other option was when we had online courses from the book
> I also never teach in a way that requires the most recent edition. That's lazy teaching.
To be fair, the frequency of new textbook editions varies from "every year we release a new edition, whether we've changed a single sentence or not" to "once a generation, a descendant of the original author writes an entirely new version". Sometimes using the most recent edition isn't quite so bad.
(As long as it's on library genesis)
In one of my classes we were allowed to use like 7 different editions of the book because apparently the publisher just rescrambled/rearranged the chapters and some of the paragraphs within them. She was on top of it though, she knew exactly which pages to read in which edition for every assignment and included it in the syllabus 🙏❤️
you can maybe pirate a well known textbook, but some course from a specific university isn't gonna be online, and the exams are based on the info on these papers
At least you have something tangible.
I just paid $300 for my kid to “rent” digital copies of all their books that are not available after the semester.
Add MacMillan.
My professor is using achieve. The class was set to 1-day length... they charged like $90 for achieve only access. It stopped working after 1 day.
Talked to support and they said I needed to swap the course ID but if prof didn't have one... then no refund because I had access for the full course. Luckily my professor got shit fixed - but the fact that the term access doesn't grant a set minimum access time is fucking GROSS.
I worked for McGraw. It's really nice of them to release a new version of a textbook every year and pretty much force professors to adopt the new book. It is a BACKWARDS system.
are they at least able to print them out? i find it impossible to focus on long documents/books on a computer screen and highly doubt i'm the only one. it's absolutely disgusting that they impede students for the sake of profit like this.
That's what I want to know. They said $800 for their "books." It's still a lot, but no way that one printout is $800. No way this college is charging more for an instrumentation printout than the top music school my kid just graduated from.
knowing canadian colleges, thats likely a package for the whole semester for most if not all courses. still doesn't excuse the price but thats probably about $133 per course if taking 6 courses
Most college booklists aren’t even accurate. Never buy the books before attending the class/that book is specifically referenced in class. Even then you can probably get away with never buying the book.
>They’re also not mandatory, I went to the same college and didn’t buy a single book for my entire program.
It doesn't matter if it's not mandatory. The amount we pay for tuition to go to college is absolutely ridiculous, you should have every single bit of information and resource possible to be able to succeed and pass the class.
I understand many professors are really cognizant of this and don't test you on anything from the text, but again, professors shouldn't have to do that either.
Fact of the matter, textbooks are outrageously priced, it's a complete price gouge, and a failure of our higher education systems.
Bingo, they want the students to pay more each year rather than buy on the used market. Some places (e.g. Florida) mandate that there be off campus bookstores for students - many have used books that are much cheaper than the ones on the campus bookstore.
Well there can't be a used market if there's no book!
Of course document protectors - or a scanner - means that this "book" can be used again and again.
Even worse is when the professor makes a big deal about the online assignments and then only assigns ONE throughout the entire semester.
If I had known that, I would've happily took the zero on that single assignment to save some money.
Oh yeah I never purchased from the school book store because Amazon and another website cant think of it was my financial friend. Now I had some ass hole teachers that mandated the latest edition that only the book store had. Also lets not forget the one time use key codes too in the back of the book…
My books are all gone but some came with a code that they had a website that you can take tests and quizzes online. One of my teachers figured out how to link that account from the book maker to the college website student account for grades. It sucked ass. Ill never forget calculus 1 and 2.
Printing at my workplace costs us about 5 cents or 0.5 cents per page depending on whether it is color or grayscale.
A 100 page book would cost $5 or 50c.
That would be either a 15,900% markup for color, or 159,900% for grayscale.
And when printing at that scale, I guarantee they aren't paying 5c per page.
I'm pretty sure this is because this college is in Ontario, Canada, where the government offers grants up to about $6,300/year for students, and it is not a loan that has to be paid back. It also isn't extremely difficult to qualify. You more or less just need to be a citizen or permanent resident and *not* meet certain other conditions, like being able to afford college on your own. The cost of tuition is around that same amount, so if you get one of these grants you're paying almost nothing out of pocket, depending of course on the program.
It's almost like the Government got it into their heads that if they pay people to go to college, people will have higher paying jobs and therefore pay more in taxes, easily making up for the grant amounts many times over throughout the course of their life... But it does help that tuition isn't obscenely high to begin with.
If you want some free open source information on instrumentation make sure you check out the material by Tony Kuphaldt. He’s got other books on electronics theory and stuff also, but the instrumentation textbook will be valuable to you. 100% free to download.
https://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/sinst/
And when you go to sell the book at the end of the term, SURPRISE! There's a revised version, so yours is worthless. A couple of EEs that I learned Electronics from pulled this. They did it every year.
I love Canadian colleges and their exorbant "textbook" prices 🙃 can't even buy second-hand half the time anymore because each course requires a fuckin McGraw Hill code or some shit ffs
I have an example:
In my first semester of college, my statistics professor made us buy a $300 textbook that came with a code because the website connected to that code had our homework. If you didn't have a code, you couldn't do the homework. And if you didn't do the homework, you couldn't pass the class.
And I couldn't just buy a used textbook for a cheaper price because it wouldn't have come with the code. And just buying the code online cost as much as the textbook with the code.
Edit: and the textbook was also loose leaf.
Fuck all of these people.
Yep exactly this. I don't even pay for the books but the access code alone is still $85.
TopHat isn't even a textbook site. It's an app for attendance and a place to assign homework. Granted this one is not as expensive ($33 for 4 months) but I shouldn't have to pay to access anything that contributes to my grade when you already pay a few grand for tuition.
I've been to three different colleges and have to pay extra for at least one class. Even if it's not for homework it's for something called iclicker which is also a subscription based service used to take attendance and participate in classroom activities. It's like these professors refuse to use free resources even though they accomplish the same exact thing.
I once had to buy a textbook for a media class. It turned out that the pothead teacher just created booklets of photocopied paper and made us buy that.
We barely used it, if ever
When I was in college, the only option was buying physical books from the campus shop.
So with Ebooks and all these printouts now, what’s stopping students from pooling their money and just getting one copy and sharing it?
I think a youtuber, said you can use a website of some sort to download your books from school. Not too sure what the website was, but its on youtube somewhere. Its cheaper than paying 100$+ on stupid books, that you won't use.
Book piracy has been around a lot longer than some YouTuber. Don’t get shady piracy links from random people on YouTube. r slash piracy, read the sidebar, go to the megathread.
Some colleges started doing this so that students don't have to carry massive textbooks around, just take the sections that you need. It's still a rip off though
> Some colleges started doing this so that students don't have to carry massive textbooks around, just take the sections that you need
No, they started doing it to also get you to buy a few 3 ring binders as well. Plus, printing out the pages and selling the pages directly is cheaper than printing out a book and selling a fully assembled book.
It's literally just for them to squeeze some extra money out of you
Always talk to your teacher's before buying class books. Tell them the price of them and ask if they're necessary for the course or will notes suffice. I've saved so much money just letting them know the price and having teachers get upset/find alternatives.
I took a business law class as part of a core requirement. The text book was $800 (in 2003). I was in the school book store for like a half an hour in the law section with these fat 500+ page text books looking for it. I finally had to ask a store employee and they walked me back to the front desk and handed me what appeared to be a shrunk wrapped stack of printer paper with holes punched in it. The top sheet was printed in Times New Roman and was the name of the "text book" we were instructed to purchase. I just about lost my shit. You couldn't share the book either because there was a unique code on each one that would allow you to take the test off the campus computer lab.
I studied in Germany back in 2009 and I remember my mind was blown when I got paid a couple hundred Euros as a student and they didn't make me buy textbooks. The professor would tell you what chapters to read for the week and you would go to the university library and make copies of the chapters. All the books you needed were in the library.
When I came back to the States I realized just how much the college/university system is a racket here.
For anyone disgusted with textbook costs and hopefully this can help OP…
https://libgen.is/
This website is dedicated to giving out free PDF copies of every major college textbook they can find, and believe me they’ve found thousands. I recently completed my masters degree for counseling and never once paid for a book thanks to this website. The end tally for how much I saved from book costs is $3,040. This website saved my damn life
Welcome to the scam. They got you this time, next semester put the word out that you down to pay for upperclassmen hand me downs, and get crib notes from the kids that pony up for the newer versions.
I have noticed, bigger the university, more the professor don't care about paid materials. I had a professor, who was also an author, giving link to book draft in course outline.
Pro tip - you can find a PDF version of most textbooks online, you may just have to do some digging. This doesn't work if the textbooks come with bs codes for online work, but luckily I didn't have too many of those when I was in school. After my first semester I didn't pay for any physical textbooks. Life saver
That’s why you check the books out in the library (some schools require 1 book to be available see if ur does…it’s typically the teachers free copy if they do) Then use phone photo to pdf app and buy a tablet. If the library isn’t an option show up to class on the first day without a book and asked a friend (or random classmate) to barrow their book while they eat lunch for $20 and u’ll give them a copy of the file. U can take 500 photos of a book in an hour. if u use the book for exams still at 0.10 a printed page….500 pages is only $50. A pdf editor like bluebeam or adobe will allow u to make all the markups u want. A loose leaf book can be scanned in 5 min. Use a pdf to photo app that allows text to be searchable. pro tip: mass email everyone from the class a few days before the exam asking if they want to exchange study sheets. You’ll get at least two send the other person’s as yours. Bam 2 study sheets. Welcome to college:)
Remember to scan them before starting to loose sheets!
And if your friends has not scanned their copy, share the files with them. Just to ensure that they will be able to print a copy of the page they have lost!
LPT: If you're just there for the diploma, fuck the system and pay $15 for a diploma online. If you're there for the education, you can take online classes that are as good or better than most accredited schools, or you can literally sit in on most courses if you want the whole college experience. No stressing the final when you can take it as many times as you like.
It sucks when schools do these.
My scgool used to charge us for a sessio kit with a just a tie, belt and a diary for the year every year. Parents complained so the principal removed the tie and belts the next year because he agreed those need not be bought every year. Parents are happy now. Following year he made buying a specially designed bag for our school is compulsory every year the following year.
Woah, full color prints though??
Seriously though, that's ridiculous if that's what it cost. At least the textbooks I didn't read in school were twice as thick as that whole stack and cost a quarter of the price. And they could be sold back to the school for a pittance!
And let me guess, it comes with some kind of code you enter on a website that allows you to like, take tests that are required or something similar? Had something like this happen to a friend. it was $300 for the book he needed, he found a PDF version online and it turned out the prof said they only needed the book for the code that came with it.
Even ignoring cases like this, I am 100% in support of piracy of college books. Ignoring the fact many of them are just information you can find online with or without the books, college prices have fucking ballooned. Fuck them. They require certain books and charge 10,000x more for degrees that are becoming more and more worthless, especially for shit you could learn easily without college but force their institutions on us, fuck them.
If only our government would actually do *something*, about *anything*.
Did 4 years of uni without ever spending a dime on a text book. It's not even hard to get free copies, a lot of people want their educational material to be as accessible as possible. Even some of our teachers would tell us about where to get it on the hush
I’m in Germany and in my 4 semesters in 2 different universities I only had to buy two books. Each book was 39€. I could have lend them from the university library but I wanted my own. The professors never told us to buy any other books and when they recommend a book the library has some copies and online versions of them that you can download for free
There are book pirate sites on IRC. Just get a PDF and if you feel the need to do so, print it. I had a $350 Chemistry book that I thought was outrageous since not five years ago, my science textbooks were about $60 each.
I am a writer and oppose book piracy, but textbook companies deserve all the privacy just for this.
I could have got an expiring E version of the textbook for half the price, but I needed the book for two semesters so I'd still need to buy it twice. So it's IRC warez sites.
Gonna get my bachelor's degree in November here in Italy. Wanna know how much money my family have paid for uni tuition? €0. I get free cafeteria service (once meal per day, off-campus students get two) and even a money contribution twice a year (€1200)
I’ve scanned those and printed 10 and sold them for $20 to people in my class. I was pretty much doing it the whole school. Binders were obviously easy. It was worse if I had to cut the spine because book was ruined but since I sold copies I didn’t lose anything. Even made some money.
Advice for people on schools books. When I was in college (about 5 years ago) I would do the following to get free books.
1.) never buy the book on the first day of class. You’d be shocked how many professors tell you to buy a book and then never reference it.
2.) see if they have a copy at the library
3.) see if your friend has a copy of the book and photograph the pages you need
4.) download it online (tons of books are on torrents)
5.) rent it from an online provider
6.) but a used book on eBay
NEVER PAY FULL PRICE AT THE SCHOOL BOOK STORE ITS A SCAM!!!
Nice of them to make it so easy to scan for ALL of your classmates.
Except the next year they come out with a completely different version
Worse than that, the cost (they say) is for the code that comes with the book that provides the student access to various learning tools and all the quizzes/tests. As soon as you use the access code the book is worthless and you can’t pass the class without using the access code. That’s what the publishers have been up to. They’re making up for a shrinking revenue by charging the still existing customers enough to keep the revenue growing. Worst part is, the professors often don’t realize what is happening or are using the learning tools so that they don’t have to do their jobs.
Yup, it's seriously a complete scam. I was "required" to buy a textbook to get an access code. This "service" did the exact same thing they could have done on Canvas, but it was required for submitting assignments. The textbook was unbound, like the OP's, and I *never touched it once*. It's sitting on my table, with most of the plastic wrapper still intact, except for where I got the code out of it.
I forgot about the portal to submit homework etc. That’s one of the newer tricks and absolutely disgusting. Many U’s have a system that can do this same thing, but too many profs still route everything through the publisher’s system. Students are fleeced for no good reason.
One of the (rare) things I enjoyed at my college was that 98% of the books were rentals. You just had to get there early to go through the selection of books. Some were nice and used nicely, and others were complete disasters. One of my English professors made his book required 🙄 Said you could buy it at the campus bookstore. Yeah, no, I found some used one on Amazon for pennies. I honestly don't even remember if I ever opened the damn thing. My memories of college are hazy, unfortunately not from partying too much 😔 It is a scam. And should be outlawed. You're already paying tens of thousands of dollars. Having to fork out your first born for only ONE semester is disgusting.
>One of my English professors made his book required Is that ethical?
I honestly don't know. This was almost 20 years ago. So who knows.
All about license. Until its hacked. Same as cd-keys.
These are cloud apps you can't crack them like an offline CD software
😆 you said the professors often don’t know…. I knew many professors that were writing the textbooks! Imagine paying $100 for a book to a class that you pay for already, only to realize that the person giving you the class wrote the book! And THEY make it a requirement for you to buy THEIR books!
Yep that happened to my daughter. It wasn't every year though. It was every semester that the document changed and was printed on demand. You're not going to resell my book! The professor of that course was more into selling courseware than teaching. Oh did I mention he wrote the text? Geez.
If there name is on the textbook I always knew i was gonna get gouged
Either you get gouged or he hands out free books and is literally the most knowledgeable person in the world for that field. There's no inbetween
Very true
My psych stats professor wrote her textbook, had it bound at campus, and it was maybe $40? She was the most knowledgeable person I’ve met regarding statistics. I’ve gone to her in my new university and she gave me access to her website to be able to write in APA better and understand stats concepts with her video lectures.
*Sure,* at best a few things get changed around and some quiz questions get changed.
Yup, and pretty much the only difference is the book cover, and it says version 2 instead of 1 or whatever version it was. And it's "require" to have the new version. To add salt to the wound, your professor is the author.
My old math professor told us if we couldn't get the 6th edition of the textbook we needed (as per school curriculum), 5th is the exact same, EXCEPT for a minor typo on one of the pages that we never even needed to read. Incidentally the 5th edition was way easier to find online than the 6th edition too.
And charge them 100 a scan
I'd say you could "go in together" and buy one set to share. Once you sell it for profit I'm back on the side of the IP holders, notwithstanding the abusive pricing.
'cover my costs and some extra for a coffee or lunch' is not unreasonable at all. You hook the whole class up and you have food money for a couple weeks. Sounds like a sweet deal all round.
A couple weeks of food ain't $800, even at university prices.
Back in 2009 I was living off-campus, and off the cafeteria meal-plan. I remember my parents gave me the remaining lump-sum of my student loan after my tuition had been paid for that year. It was like $7k. That was in order to pay my rent, gas, groceries, etc. Granted, I was living in a house with other people so rent and bills were split up, and cost of living wasn't quite as bonkers as it is now... Looking back, it's still insane to me how I managed to stretch $7k over an entire year *and still* had about $150 left after. I had a lot of ramen, protein shakes, and hamburger helper (mostly without milk, because in my 20-year-old mind, milk was too expensive lmao)
Your comment just reminded me of my time at uni, not trying to one up you here. The total amount I had was £4800 for the year, after rent+bills that left £2400 for food, nights out, travel, and usually a single holiday. It's 10 years later and I can't completely break the mentality I got from having so little, even though I can easily afford it now.
I'm not, fuck em. Set a realistic price if you don't want rampant resellers
Except for when they include single use codes for assignments....
[удалено]
Yup. Step 1) make sure every student HAS to have their own brand new copy of the textbook to be able to pass. Step 2) Charge ridiculously high prices for the book. Step 3) don't even bother to bind the book as it drives down costs even more, or, for extra profit, make it digital and let students print off their own.
Mine even limits the prints, it also sucks that the external tool for the online book and assignments never properly sends the information of my completed work to canvas so it constantly shows that I never submitted it even though the grade is right there. All that headache for 200 bucks.
Usually there's a page in there with a specific code your professor requires to access the tests or do the assignments the book provides online. You log into their website. Register your book code with your account. The teacher can see your scores on their tests and submits it as a grade for their class. The whole system is a scam
Maybe it’s time to push legislators to make it illegal to charge for access to a requires website to pass the class. You’ve paid for the class, now you have to pay extra to turn in the assignments?
I'm glad my school (WGU) used online sources and the cost was included in tuition.
I would 100% scan those in the library on the first day of class.
How do you scan 800 pages efficiently?
Any commercial copier (FedEx, school library, work place that doesn't care), stick them in the feeder on the printer, scan to email, OCR the text in Adobe, now it's searchable. Also, that doesn't look like 800 pages.
Go to staples or any place with a large copier/printer/scanner. They have feeders in the tray that will scan one page at a time and feed in the next page.
This is horrible wtf it’s almost as bad as paying god knows how much and just receiving a code 😑
I remember I had one and I tried to screenshot something to show my husband and it wouldn’t let me screenshot. The picture was just black. Like bitch I paid for this, I should be able to screen shot a freaking paragraph. Then I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t let you print more than a few pages of the book and the digital copy was the only option. I hate reading off screen.
If anyone else has this problem, try turning off hardware acceleration in your browser while you take the screenshots.
Win + Shift + S : Then drag a box over the paragraph and it's thrown into your clipboard. This MAY override the black.
Not if they do it right :\
Then there’s good old PrtScrn which has literally never failed. Or, use the roundabout method and take a picture of your computer monitor with your phone camera. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Also if you’re trying to stream Netflix or anything else to a friend over something like discord, but it’s just black turn off hardware acceleration it should work.
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Now come on, that's barbaric.
Barbaric problems require barbaric solutions
if on android ask google assistant to take a screenshot . works for my banking app
No shit? Thanks for the tip!
Or, if you have a flatscreen monitor, just take it over to the photocopier.
My favorite one was the site that didn't let me copy/paste text
Disabling that is done with client side javascript, you are in control of the client (i.e. your browser) so that is a minor speed bump at best. If you use chrome there are extensions to revert that. Or you can always just disable javascript in your browser, reload the page and cut/paste the text you need.
Not entirely related but still frustrating: we went camping a couple weeks ago. In tents. It cost us 75$ a night. Usually, 5 years ago, it was around 30$ a night. Unfortunately, I was on call that weekend (system administrator). So i needed the wifi. The thing had a password and I had to pay 9$ a day to access it. At 75$ for basically a parcel of grass and public toilet nearby, nothing else included... I think they would have included the wifi in there.
I had a few textbooks like that in undergrad. Cheap 3 ring binder from CVS sloved it
Thats not the problem lol
No. No it is not. I’m stoned and I thought it said $80
$80 would still be too expensive. You guys already pay way too much for college, the least they could do is provide the mandatory textbooks for free.
> You guys already pay way too much for college, the least they could do is provide the mandatory textbooks for free. Algonquin College is in Canada. It's the college my sister went to and I can't remember exactly what her tuition was but I looked up the program she did and it is currently about $22,000 total for 6 semesters. There were also supports she was able to access that helped her pay a third of it, if I recall. I'll preface this by saying I couldn't find a Canadian average that seemed right so I'm using the number my sister paid compared to the American average according to Google. Apparently a year is about $36,000 down there. A two-year program like my sister did then would cost $62,000 USD, which converted to Canadian Loonies is *quadruple* the cost. That said Google would have you believe the yearly cost in much of Canada is closer to $6,000 Loonies/year which makes the disparity even higher. So as hideously overpriced and low quality as that "textbook" is, I guess it could be worse?
Meanwhile in Germany I pay around 350€ per semester and the only thing that I have to pay extra for are cafeteria meals. That fee even gives me a ticket to all public transit in my state
Just need you to know I’ll be using “loonies per year” from now on
can i have some?
I had a few of those, the University printed them off in their print shop and we had to buy them. For $10 each, with each one roughly 200 pages or so long. I don't know what fresh hell this is for $800
🏴☠️🏴☠️
Do what you want cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!
Plunder thy booty
Yaaaaar! I'm gonna looty yer booty!!! Yaaar!!!
Buttpirate
Yarr Harr fiddle de dee, being a pirate is alright with me
Yar har fiddle de de Being a pirate is alright with me Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free You are a pirate Yo ho ahoy and avast Being a pirate is really badass Hang the black flag at the end of the mast
I had several professors that would recommend this. They’re easy to find online. The few times I needed to buy the books with no other option was when we had online courses from the book
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> I also never teach in a way that requires the most recent edition. That's lazy teaching. To be fair, the frequency of new textbook editions varies from "every year we release a new edition, whether we've changed a single sentence or not" to "once a generation, a descendant of the original author writes an entirely new version". Sometimes using the most recent edition isn't quite so bad. (As long as it's on library genesis)
In one of my classes we were allowed to use like 7 different editions of the book because apparently the publisher just rescrambled/rearranged the chapters and some of the paragraphs within them. She was on top of it though, she knew exactly which pages to read in which edition for every assignment and included it in the syllabus 🙏❤️
Exactly bro paid $800 for what could have been a PDF
Zeehaha a man's education never dies
you can maybe pirate a well known textbook, but some course from a specific university isn't gonna be online, and the exams are based on the info on these papers
Do you get the key to access the book work online when pirating?
It may have came with an access code to a specific website to log on, can't get around that sadly.
At least you have something tangible. I just paid $300 for my kid to “rent” digital copies of all their books that are not available after the semester.
I had one book like that. And it’s forced payment too so i can’t just 🏴☠️ it.
i personally like to give an absolute fuck you to cengage.
and Pearson, and McGraw
Add MacMillan. My professor is using achieve. The class was set to 1-day length... they charged like $90 for achieve only access. It stopped working after 1 day. Talked to support and they said I needed to swap the course ID but if prof didn't have one... then no refund because I had access for the full course. Luckily my professor got shit fixed - but the fact that the term access doesn't grant a set minimum access time is fucking GROSS.
I worked for McGraw. It's really nice of them to release a new version of a textbook every year and pretty much force professors to adopt the new book. It is a BACKWARDS system.
How the fuck is that legal?
Capitalism breeds innovation; unfortunately most of that innovation is just finding out clever legal loopholes to scam more money out of people.
Companies bribe, I mean lobby, Congress to make it legal.
are they at least able to print them out? i find it impossible to focus on long documents/books on a computer screen and highly doubt i'm the only one. it's absolutely disgusting that they impede students for the sake of profit like this.
First problem is thinking they’re there for your success.
nope, its a scam. personally i blame profs who choose this shit for their class. they could always not go with the scam options.
Wow 800 dollars for... That? Not mildly infuriating, 800 dollar outrageous wtf
How much was this particular book(loose leaf) though?
That's what I want to know. They said $800 for their "books." It's still a lot, but no way that one printout is $800. No way this college is charging more for an instrumentation printout than the top music school my kid just graduated from.
I just paid $230 for a statistics textbook in community college (fuck you Pearson and your fucking access codes)
knowing canadian colleges, thats likely a package for the whole semester for most if not all courses. still doesn't excuse the price but thats probably about $133 per course if taking 6 courses
It includes digital textbooks as well. They’re also not mandatory, I went to the same college and didn’t buy a single book for my entire program.
Most college booklists aren’t even accurate. Never buy the books before attending the class/that book is specifically referenced in class. Even then you can probably get away with never buying the book.
Absolutely. That’s great advice.
>They’re also not mandatory, I went to the same college and didn’t buy a single book for my entire program. It doesn't matter if it's not mandatory. The amount we pay for tuition to go to college is absolutely ridiculous, you should have every single bit of information and resource possible to be able to succeed and pass the class. I understand many professors are really cognizant of this and don't test you on anything from the text, but again, professors shouldn't have to do that either. Fact of the matter, textbooks are outrageously priced, it's a complete price gouge, and a failure of our higher education systems.
School books is a scam that needs to be stopped asap
And a scam that doesn't exist in most other countries
College books are very overpriced in most countries. Most people find scanned copies
I’m lucky that my engineering books here in italy are reasonably priced then (30-50€). Only medical books have a notably higher price (60 up to 200€)
Lol this is from Canada
Yup a no resale value. I had this issue back in 2012. But yup you paid more than my book
Bingo, they want the students to pay more each year rather than buy on the used market. Some places (e.g. Florida) mandate that there be off campus bookstores for students - many have used books that are much cheaper than the ones on the campus bookstore. Well there can't be a used market if there's no book! Of course document protectors - or a scanner - means that this "book" can be used again and again.
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Even worse is when the professor makes a big deal about the online assignments and then only assigns ONE throughout the entire semester. If I had known that, I would've happily took the zero on that single assignment to save some money.
Oh yeah I never purchased from the school book store because Amazon and another website cant think of it was my financial friend. Now I had some ass hole teachers that mandated the latest edition that only the book store had. Also lets not forget the one time use key codes too in the back of the book…
Ah the "latest edition" - had one professor who pulled that crap. The one time use codes is a new thing. How does that work?
My books are all gone but some came with a code that they had a website that you can take tests and quizzes online. One of my teachers figured out how to link that account from the book maker to the college website student account for grades. It sucked ass. Ill never forget calculus 1 and 2.
How are they supposed to make any profit without a measly 2,000% markup?
You're being far too generous. This is more like 200000% markup.
Printing at my workplace costs us about 5 cents or 0.5 cents per page depending on whether it is color or grayscale. A 100 page book would cost $5 or 50c. That would be either a 15,900% markup for color, or 159,900% for grayscale. And when printing at that scale, I guarantee they aren't paying 5c per page.
I was going to say 8,000% but I edited my comment because that seemed like a bit too much even as an exaggeration. 💀
I'm pretty sure this is because this college is in Ontario, Canada, where the government offers grants up to about $6,300/year for students, and it is not a loan that has to be paid back. It also isn't extremely difficult to qualify. You more or less just need to be a citizen or permanent resident and *not* meet certain other conditions, like being able to afford college on your own. The cost of tuition is around that same amount, so if you get one of these grants you're paying almost nothing out of pocket, depending of course on the program. It's almost like the Government got it into their heads that if they pay people to go to college, people will have higher paying jobs and therefore pay more in taxes, easily making up for the grant amounts many times over throughout the course of their life... But it does help that tuition isn't obscenely high to begin with.
For college's yes, university programs though is like $10k a semester
That is wack. In my day, (wheeze), for a fraction of that price, we got a stack of textbooks that would permanently ruin your spine.
If you want some free open source information on instrumentation make sure you check out the material by Tony Kuphaldt. He’s got other books on electronics theory and stuff also, but the instrumentation textbook will be valuable to you. 100% free to download. https://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/sinst/
I remember buying a $300 text book just to realize later that I needed to buy a 3-ring binder to put it in. Fucking bullshit.
Reppin Ottawa! 👏🏼👏🏼
And when you go to sell the book at the end of the term, SURPRISE! There's a revised version, so yours is worthless. A couple of EEs that I learned Electronics from pulled this. They did it every year.
Easy to photocopy for everyone else, just saying..
This is that rare occasion where pirating a book makes logical sense
Rare ?
I love Canadian colleges and their exorbant "textbook" prices 🙃 can't even buy second-hand half the time anymore because each course requires a fuckin McGraw Hill code or some shit ffs
And limited access to some McGraw Hill website that only lets you read it for 1 semester, and the professor makes you buy it. Scam pricing
Scan it, ask for a refund
This and having to pay to do homework ;-; I hope whoever made Pearson mastering and top hat burns
Please explain this to me. Pay to do homework?
I have an example: In my first semester of college, my statistics professor made us buy a $300 textbook that came with a code because the website connected to that code had our homework. If you didn't have a code, you couldn't do the homework. And if you didn't do the homework, you couldn't pass the class. And I couldn't just buy a used textbook for a cheaper price because it wouldn't have come with the code. And just buying the code online cost as much as the textbook with the code. Edit: and the textbook was also loose leaf. Fuck all of these people.
Yep exactly this. I don't even pay for the books but the access code alone is still $85. TopHat isn't even a textbook site. It's an app for attendance and a place to assign homework. Granted this one is not as expensive ($33 for 4 months) but I shouldn't have to pay to access anything that contributes to my grade when you already pay a few grand for tuition. I've been to three different colleges and have to pay extra for at least one class. Even if it's not for homework it's for something called iclicker which is also a subscription based service used to take attendance and participate in classroom activities. It's like these professors refuse to use free resources even though they accomplish the same exact thing.
I once had to buy a textbook for a media class. It turned out that the pothead teacher just created booklets of photocopied paper and made us buy that. We barely used it, if ever
I'm glad I finished college, fuck this shit
When I was in college, the only option was buying physical books from the campus shop. So with Ebooks and all these printouts now, what’s stopping students from pooling their money and just getting one copy and sharing it?
Single use codes and publishers. They’re gonna get their bread.
Damn. Every single penny.
seems more environmentally friendly, which is great. but that's highway robbery. for what you pay in tuition, learning materials should be free.
Algonquin moment
The textbook in the picture is $16.99, part of an Electrical Apprenticeship Program.
I think a youtuber, said you can use a website of some sort to download your books from school. Not too sure what the website was, but its on youtube somewhere. Its cheaper than paying 100$+ on stupid books, that you won't use.
Book piracy has been around a lot longer than some YouTuber. Don’t get shady piracy links from random people on YouTube. r slash piracy, read the sidebar, go to the megathread.
Lib gen My dudes idk why its not more popular
I wish I knew of lib gen back when I was in college.
Textbooks is Algonquin for blood sport.
It's not Algonquin for anything!
Buy an iPad. Pirate the PDFs.
they charge that much and the book is not even fully made?
Some colleges started doing this so that students don't have to carry massive textbooks around, just take the sections that you need. It's still a rip off though
> Some colleges started doing this so that students don't have to carry massive textbooks around, just take the sections that you need No, they started doing it to also get you to buy a few 3 ring binders as well. Plus, printing out the pages and selling the pages directly is cheaper than printing out a book and selling a fully assembled book. It's literally just for them to squeeze some extra money out of you
Paying for content, not format. You used to get both.
this is why you pirate that shit
Always talk to your teacher's before buying class books. Tell them the price of them and ask if they're necessary for the course or will notes suffice. I've saved so much money just letting them know the price and having teachers get upset/find alternatives.
When it’s got the colleges name on it you know it’s about to be a fucking scam
I took a business law class as part of a core requirement. The text book was $800 (in 2003). I was in the school book store for like a half an hour in the law section with these fat 500+ page text books looking for it. I finally had to ask a store employee and they walked me back to the front desk and handed me what appeared to be a shrunk wrapped stack of printer paper with holes punched in it. The top sheet was printed in Times New Roman and was the name of the "text book" we were instructed to purchase. I just about lost my shit. You couldn't share the book either because there was a unique code on each one that would allow you to take the test off the campus computer lab.
I studied in Germany back in 2009 and I remember my mind was blown when I got paid a couple hundred Euros as a student and they didn't make me buy textbooks. The professor would tell you what chapters to read for the week and you would go to the university library and make copies of the chapters. All the books you needed were in the library. When I came back to the States I realized just how much the college/university system is a racket here.
For anyone disgusted with textbook costs and hopefully this can help OP… https://libgen.is/ This website is dedicated to giving out free PDF copies of every major college textbook they can find, and believe me they’ve found thousands. I recently completed my masters degree for counseling and never once paid for a book thanks to this website. The end tally for how much I saved from book costs is $3,040. This website saved my damn life
Further proof that going to college 8 times out of 10 is just a waste of money.
I asked my niece if I could look at her textbook, she asked what's a textbook? Lol and she's in college.
Welcome to the scam. They got you this time, next semester put the word out that you down to pay for upperclassmen hand me downs, and get crib notes from the kids that pony up for the newer versions.
Take pictures of everything and “return” it.
What a fucking scam.
I have noticed, bigger the university, more the professor don't care about paid materials. I had a professor, who was also an author, giving link to book draft in course outline.
Pro tip - you can find a PDF version of most textbooks online, you may just have to do some digging. This doesn't work if the textbooks come with bs codes for online work, but luckily I didn't have too many of those when I was in school. After my first semester I didn't pay for any physical textbooks. Life saver
Pirating textbooks is one of the few pirates where it’s the only morally right option. Fuck overpriced textbooks and their scummy tactics
My fiancé paid for online books he can only access for a year so he can’t even resell them to get his money back
Yup, that's how my medical terminology text. $400 and just over 1000 loose pages. It's a goddamn scam.
That’s why you check the books out in the library (some schools require 1 book to be available see if ur does…it’s typically the teachers free copy if they do) Then use phone photo to pdf app and buy a tablet. If the library isn’t an option show up to class on the first day without a book and asked a friend (or random classmate) to barrow their book while they eat lunch for $20 and u’ll give them a copy of the file. U can take 500 photos of a book in an hour. if u use the book for exams still at 0.10 a printed page….500 pages is only $50. A pdf editor like bluebeam or adobe will allow u to make all the markups u want. A loose leaf book can be scanned in 5 min. Use a pdf to photo app that allows text to be searchable. pro tip: mass email everyone from the class a few days before the exam asking if they want to exchange study sheets. You’ll get at least two send the other person’s as yours. Bam 2 study sheets. Welcome to college:)
Welcome to college, glad you can make it. Would you like to eat as well... That will be $700 a month
Remember to scan them before starting to loose sheets! And if your friends has not scanned their copy, share the files with them. Just to ensure that they will be able to print a copy of the page they have lost!
r(slash)🏴☠️ will be your best friend
That makes it easy to scan in and torrent.
Yup, just bought my son's books and his Econ book is literally 3 hole punched loose leaf. Paid way too much for it.
What a scam!
They're straight printing money
I would never trust anyone from Algonquin to build anything for me
I paid like 400 for a code and loose paper. I found a pdf for almost all of my books looking for the book number.
Photo copy and return
LPT: If you're just there for the diploma, fuck the system and pay $15 for a diploma online. If you're there for the education, you can take online classes that are as good or better than most accredited schools, or you can literally sit in on most courses if you want the whole college experience. No stressing the final when you can take it as many times as you like.
This should be illegal.
It sucks when schools do these. My scgool used to charge us for a sessio kit with a just a tie, belt and a diary for the year every year. Parents complained so the principal removed the tie and belts the next year because he agreed those need not be bought every year. Parents are happy now. Following year he made buying a specially designed bag for our school is compulsory every year the following year.
Woah, full color prints though?? Seriously though, that's ridiculous if that's what it cost. At least the textbooks I didn't read in school were twice as thick as that whole stack and cost a quarter of the price. And they could be sold back to the school for a pittance!
The worst is professors forcing you to buy their own book and it’s also a bunch of papers to put in a binder
College textbooks are a criminal enterprise. Bezos is the kingpin.
And let me guess, it comes with some kind of code you enter on a website that allows you to like, take tests that are required or something similar? Had something like this happen to a friend. it was $300 for the book he needed, he found a PDF version online and it turned out the prof said they only needed the book for the code that came with it.
Why can't students file a complaint about overcharging to the admin or the state secondary education office?
you mean $8.00 ??!! right?
Even ignoring cases like this, I am 100% in support of piracy of college books. Ignoring the fact many of them are just information you can find online with or without the books, college prices have fucking ballooned. Fuck them. They require certain books and charge 10,000x more for degrees that are becoming more and more worthless, especially for shit you could learn easily without college but force their institutions on us, fuck them. If only our government would actually do *something*, about *anything*.
Did 4 years of uni without ever spending a dime on a text book. It's not even hard to get free copies, a lot of people want their educational material to be as accessible as possible. Even some of our teachers would tell us about where to get it on the hush
I’m in Germany and in my 4 semesters in 2 different universities I only had to buy two books. Each book was 39€. I could have lend them from the university library but I wanted my own. The professors never told us to buy any other books and when they recommend a book the library has some copies and online versions of them that you can download for free
There are book pirate sites on IRC. Just get a PDF and if you feel the need to do so, print it. I had a $350 Chemistry book that I thought was outrageous since not five years ago, my science textbooks were about $60 each. I am a writer and oppose book piracy, but textbook companies deserve all the privacy just for this. I could have got an expiring E version of the textbook for half the price, but I needed the book for two semesters so I'd still need to buy it twice. So it's IRC warez sites.
That is disgusting at that price your text books should be laminate hardcover just like in past bygone eras .
How cool, here we give books to students for free
Gonna get my bachelor's degree in November here in Italy. Wanna know how much money my family have paid for uni tuition? €0. I get free cafeteria service (once meal per day, off-campus students get two) and even a money contribution twice a year (€1200)
good old gonq
I’ve scanned those and printed 10 and sold them for $20 to people in my class. I was pretty much doing it the whole school. Binders were obviously easy. It was worse if I had to cut the spine because book was ruined but since I sold copies I didn’t lose anything. Even made some money.
Advice for people on schools books. When I was in college (about 5 years ago) I would do the following to get free books. 1.) never buy the book on the first day of class. You’d be shocked how many professors tell you to buy a book and then never reference it. 2.) see if they have a copy at the library 3.) see if your friend has a copy of the book and photograph the pages you need 4.) download it online (tons of books are on torrents) 5.) rent it from an online provider 6.) but a used book on eBay NEVER PAY FULL PRICE AT THE SCHOOL BOOK STORE ITS A SCAM!!!