10 ms·

I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was p

I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free. So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.

zamadatix 7y ago
It being "unfair" seems to hinge on the assumption piracy = lost sale. Unless your friend simply laments people learn when they otherwise wouldn't have paid anyways in which case I'm not particularly sympathetic but at least understand the reasoning.
- la_barba 7y ago
  As an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to BSD or some other free OSs? If even a single person goes out and buys Windows, then there is a definite argument that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales. Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/european-commission-accused-of-burying-controversial-piracy-report/#7903304e7e1d https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/europ... I'd argue it's exceptionally rare that a digital good be so unique as to be a "buy legitimately or have nothing" item and any DRM designed to treat software like that does more harm to sales through difficulty to purchase or use than it saves.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      >As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? Why Windows became popular will never have a single unarguable objective answer. It was probably a combination of factors, like anything else. The only fact we know is that Microsoft became one the most successful and richest companies, and it was because hundreds of millions of people paid Microsoft for their software, when credible alternatives existed and continue to exist. >If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales. I'm not sure I follow your line of thought here. Piracy made windows popular, and so people bought Windows because... they didn't want to pirate it? That is a pretty convoluted argument.. ! :)
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > Piracy made windows popular, and so people bought Windows because... they didn't want to pirate it? Many pirates are not bad people: they want to pay for your content, but for a variety of reasons they can’t (DRM prevents them from using it they way they want, they can’t afford it right now, etc.) As circumstances change they will purchase your stuff.
      - kexx 7y ago
        Microsoft did not grow big, because millions of home users decided to buy DOS/Windows as they considered the best choice. Microsoft purchased DOS, which was bundled for every single IBM PC. This gave the foundation for the company to be able to improve their software family giving them a stable income even if every single DOS alternative was superior to their system. IBM was not able to prevent the creation of the PC compatibles which was a really strong advantage for MS as DOS became their default go to OS. Cheap computers created a really big market for the platform so developing to MS products became a good idea. However the businesses were the ones who choose to buy Microsoft products, and not because of the OS, but their office software products, which worked, of course, primarily in their OS. Most of the home users just get it bundled with their hardware purchase, others for home use just pirated it (especially out of US). Their focus were the software they use, did not really care about the OS. And that's how piracy helped MS, children playing with computer games arrived in the work market with familiarity with MS products, which kept the companies using and buying those products.
fooblitzky 7y ago
DRM has a long history of failing to stop piracy.
- asark 7y ago
  Further, pirated works have a long history of not getting shut off or otherwise made inaccessible, unlike "legitimate" DRM'd copies. :-/ [EDIT] what I'm getting at is that DRM doesn't just fail to stop piracy, it also makes the pirated version much better than the original.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Works pretty well for Steam. I bet most people here don't even know that they can't play their Steam games if they don't connect it to the internet every 30(?) days. Yet people boast about their massive Steam libraries. :)
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Because Steam is DRM done right (in terms of ease of use). With Steam, you just press a button, and the game is yours to play. Zero friction. 99% of the time DRM is used, it makes the product less convenient to use by people who bought it legally, as opposed to those who pirated it. An example that comes to mind, all those blu-rays with bajillion of warnings and ads before the movie starts vs. just watching the movie right off the bat without any ads or wasted time if pirated. Don't even get me started on Denuvo or any other video-game DRMs, those are creatures straight out of UX nightmares.
  - nwallin 7y ago
    Steam gets around by having an amazing UX. Press button get game. It's easier than pirating, while most other drm solutions are generally more difficult than pirating. Steam doesn't even have particularly good drm. The media isn't encrypted, only the executables, so you can generally just get a nocd crack and overwrite the encrypted binary in the install folder.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    Note that some Steam games are DRM-free and do not require Steam for anything beyond first download. Sadly this isn't mentioned anywhere in the game page so unless you already know about if a game uses Steam's DRM or not, it is a gamble.
INTPenis 7y ago
DRM is a ludicrous solution to preventing ebook piracy. One of the first things I learned as a teenager online was that anything that can be read, seen or heard can also be copied. It's only with interactive things like games and programs that pirates have a real challenge.
- dgudkov 7y ago
  There is a big difference between copying physical objects and digital ones. Books can be copied for sure, but the cost of copying a digital book is negligible compared to the cost of copying a real book. Zero cost of copying makes it possible to give it away for free (e.g. to drive traffic) and monetize otherwise (most digital piracy is business, not charity). In the physical world, copied books are not given away for free typically because the cost of copying a book is relatively high. Copyrighting digital items is a fundamental problem which has no good solution so far.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Does it matter what the cost is if it's cheaper and the money doesn't go to the owner? Seems like reasoning in search of a real world difference rather than a real world difference in search of reasoning.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    A physical book can readily be hand-scanned in an hour. There are numerous guides to processing the scans from that point. Two of the besst I've found: https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning.html https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning.... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file
    - dgudkov 7y ago
      It's not about scanning. It's about printing (replicating) a book - it is significantly more expensive to replicate a real book than a digital book.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
unpwn 7y ago
Piracy sucks for creators, but I also don't think it's fair that poor people should have less access to text books.
bunje 7y ago
I don't understand your comment. So was your friends book not DRM'd or how could people share it illegally?
- docker_up 7y ago
  There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.
na85 7y ago
Perhaps he should publish his next book in dead-tree format.
- docker_up 7y ago
  It was in dead-tree format only.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    So are you suggesting authors shouldn't sell hard-copy books, because they don't have DRM? I am REALLY confused as to what you are advocating.
rahimiali 7y ago
Does your friend get royalty for each copy of the book? Could your friend have negotiated an upfront fee from the publisher and no royalty? This way, only the publisher would be exposed to piracy risk, a risk it can manage much better than an author ever could.
rhinoceraptor 7y ago
Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  >$200 each Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.
  - nvusuvu 7y ago
    Has the price changed recently?
    - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
      Yes, it's inflated. Looking up a selection of my engineering textbooks from junior and senior year at my alma mater, where I remember new list prices of $150-200 and used prices of $100-150 per course in books they now add up to a typical $250 list new. However, there are a lot of ebook options now for $50-100 per course. Books that can stop working, as crazy as the linked tweet thread acknowledges. Books that will not be available on my bookshelf if I want to keep them for reference in the future. And there's still piracy. I expect the ebooks will make this more and not less popular; a lot of pirated textbooks were...allegedly....low-quality scans when I was in college.
      - asdff 7y ago
        Pirated textbooks are better than the ebook even. I wonder how they are sourced, because they are clean proofs even with markings where the binding obscures the pages when printed as a textbook. Must be from someone with access to those raw files. Plus, they are PDFs, and not clunky slow ebook files of varying proprietary format and offline availability. Textbook prices correlate with federal loan amounts. Publishers probably take the same % of that loan limit to price their books, so ironically the tools designed to help make education affordable are being exploited to make education unaffordable.
  - 7y ago
noonespecial 7y ago
At this point we've seen this play out so many times that using DRM to "stop piracy" is like tossing the virgin into the volcano to stop the eruption. Yes losing all of those pretty girls sucks but so do volcanoes destroying the village...
tomxor 7y ago
Most authors of anything other than best selling trash don't make anything worth caring about. Almost all the money goes to publishing, including ebooks. Does piracy still suck?
satysin 7y ago
So what you're saying is the mechanism they put in place to prevent your friends book from being pirated failed within months? Yet all those who purchased it legally could one day be left with having their purchase shut off? They might be lucky and get refunds but they still lose access to the book. To me that seems like an utter failure for everyone.
- docker_up 7y ago
  There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    So.. I am confused what your point is? DRM wouldn't have helped this situation, which I think actually HELPS the case against DRM... it only hurts legitimate readers, pirates would have gotten it anyway.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    What was the price of this. book? Numerous engineering texts run $100s, some north of $1,000. Pure rent-seeking. Reasonable pricing has proved the best piracy.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      I a word: "piracy deterrent ".
  - harshreality 7y ago
    Can you disclose which textbook it was? I'm curious. Was it a good textbook? The textbook market is a predatory scheme to fleece money out of students who are usually pretty close to broke, by making the books more important even than healthy food. Not releasing a new edition every few years would have the same effect as "piracy", once the used market is large enough to supply each new class. Professors and professionals who write textbooks should treat them as a marketing and career advancement exercise. Write a good book, get noticed by tenure committees or potential consulting clients. Most people who write books like that already have relatively secure jobs, and the book, if it's not awful, improves their career trajectory even more. It builds their reputation or brand. It's tough to side with them over broke college students slavishly scanning thousand-page textbooks while eating ramen.
docker_up 7y ago
The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  Maybe that's because these sob stories were already accounted for by the _original_ copyright length of 28 years? The vast majority of DRM is protecting some corporation's right to profit off of the work of content creators almost indefinitely.
  - dageshi 7y ago
    Most DRM is there to protect it during the initial sales window when demand and awareness of the product are at their highest.
    - cyphar 7y ago
      So why not release a DRM-free version after that window? I'd be happy to wait 6 months to buy a movie if that's what it took to get a DRM-free copy.
    - mark-r 7y ago
      Citation needed. It seems very clear from the history of copyright law that the whole thing is just a money grab.
      - dageshi 7y ago
        I'm not talking about copyright law, I'm talking about DRM. Go look at the videogame industry and denuvo. They use it because it's hard to crack during the initial sales window, once it gets cracked usually after a couple months they patch it out and don't bother to replace it because its job is done.
warp_factor 7y ago
Paying for books is the old model. I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > I will gladly donate Everyone says. Nobody does.
Miner49er 7y ago
DRM isn't the answer. It's always been trivial to break DRM on e-books, and I wouldn't be surprised if DRM actually increases pirating. Why buy something that restricts your ability to use it and is inconvenient when you can pirate a version that doesn't do that?
shawnz 7y ago
> It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free. It's unfair? Sounds like a dream come true to me, I'd love for my work to have such incredible reach. Is your friend starving, or living on the street or something?
justinmeiners 7y ago
This definitely sucks. Why do you think people are buying this book? Is it required for a course? When there is a book I need, but don't want, I'll get by with a PDF. When its a book I want, I buy the real thing, because I enjoy having it. Just curious, what the intended use of the book is, and whether you think a similar attitude might have had any effect.
asdff 7y ago
Who do you think pirates textbooks? Chances are, your friend would have made dimes per book while the publisher pulled $180 a pop from broke indebted students trapped in a captive market. Textbooks have gotten so costly because students are just the publisher's delivery device for the huge amounts of federal loan money awarded every year.

zamadatix 7y ago

It being "unfair" seems to hinge on the assumption piracy = lost sale. Unless your friend simply laments people learn when they otherwise wouldn't have paid anyways in which case I'm not particularly sympathetic but at least understand the reasoning.

la_barba 7y ago
As an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to BSD or some other free OSs? If even a single person goes out and buys Windows, then there is a definite argument that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales. Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/european-commission-accused-of-burying-controversial-piracy-report/#7903304e7e1d https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/europ... I'd argue it's exceptionally rare that a digital good be so unique as to be a "buy legitimately or have nothing" item and any DRM designed to treat software like that does more harm to sales through difficulty to purchase or use than it saves.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    >As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? Why Windows became popular will never have a single unarguable objective answer. It was probably a combination of factors, like anything else. The only fact we know is that Microsoft became one the most successful and richest companies, and it was because hundreds of millions of people paid Microsoft for their software, when credible alternatives existed and continue to exist. >If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales. I'm not sure I follow your line of thought here. Piracy made windows popular, and so people bought Windows because... they didn't want to pirate it? That is a pretty convoluted argument.. ! :)
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Piracy made windows popular, and so people bought Windows because... they didn't want to pirate it? Many pirates are not bad people: they want to pay for your content, but for a variety of reasons they can’t (DRM prevents them from using it they way they want, they can’t afford it right now, etc.) As circumstances change they will purchase your stuff.
    - kexx 7y ago
      Microsoft did not grow big, because millions of home users decided to buy DOS/Windows as they considered the best choice. Microsoft purchased DOS, which was bundled for every single IBM PC. This gave the foundation for the company to be able to improve their software family giving them a stable income even if every single DOS alternative was superior to their system. IBM was not able to prevent the creation of the PC compatibles which was a really strong advantage for MS as DOS became their default go to OS. Cheap computers created a really big market for the platform so developing to MS products became a good idea. However the businesses were the ones who choose to buy Microsoft products, and not because of the OS, but their office software products, which worked, of course, primarily in their OS. Most of the home users just get it bundled with their hardware purchase, others for home use just pirated it (especially out of US). Their focus were the software they use, did not really care about the OS. And that's how piracy helped MS, children playing with computer games arrived in the work market with familiarity with MS products, which kept the companies using and buying those products.

fooblitzky 7y ago

DRM has a long history of failing to stop piracy.

asark 7y ago
Further, pirated works have a long history of not getting shut off or otherwise made inaccessible, unlike "legitimate" DRM'd copies. :-/ [EDIT] what I'm getting at is that DRM doesn't just fail to stop piracy, it also makes the pirated version much better than the original.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Works pretty well for Steam. I bet most people here don't even know that they can't play their Steam games if they don't connect it to the internet every 30(?) days. Yet people boast about their massive Steam libraries. :)
- filoleg 7y ago
  Because Steam is DRM done right (in terms of ease of use). With Steam, you just press a button, and the game is yours to play. Zero friction. 99% of the time DRM is used, it makes the product less convenient to use by people who bought it legally, as opposed to those who pirated it. An example that comes to mind, all those blu-rays with bajillion of warnings and ads before the movie starts vs. just watching the movie right off the bat without any ads or wasted time if pirated. Don't even get me started on Denuvo or any other video-game DRMs, those are creatures straight out of UX nightmares.
- nwallin 7y ago
  Steam gets around by having an amazing UX. Press button get game. It's easier than pirating, while most other drm solutions are generally more difficult than pirating. Steam doesn't even have particularly good drm. The media isn't encrypted, only the executables, so you can generally just get a nocd crack and overwrite the encrypted binary in the install folder.
- Crinus 7y ago
  Note that some Steam games are DRM-free and do not require Steam for anything beyond first download. Sadly this isn't mentioned anywhere in the game page so unless you already know about if a game uses Steam's DRM or not, it is a gamble.

INTPenis 7y ago

DRM is a ludicrous solution to preventing ebook piracy. One of the first things I learned as a teenager online was that anything that can be read, seen or heard can also be copied. It's only with interactive things like games and programs that pirates have a real challenge.

dgudkov 7y ago
There is a big difference between copying physical objects and digital ones. Books can be copied for sure, but the cost of copying a digital book is negligible compared to the cost of copying a real book. Zero cost of copying makes it possible to give it away for free (e.g. to drive traffic) and monetize otherwise (most digital piracy is business, not charity). In the physical world, copied books are not given away for free typically because the cost of copying a book is relatively high. Copyrighting digital items is a fundamental problem which has no good solution so far.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Does it matter what the cost is if it's cheaper and the money doesn't go to the owner? Seems like reasoning in search of a real world difference rather than a real world difference in search of reasoning.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  A physical book can readily be hand-scanned in an hour. There are numerous guides to processing the scans from that point. Two of the besst I've found: https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning.html https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning.... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file
  - dgudkov 7y ago
    It's not about scanning. It's about printing (replicating) a book - it is significantly more expensive to replicate a real book than a digital book.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

unpwn 7y ago

Piracy sucks for creators, but I also don't think it's fair that poor people should have less access to text books.

bunje 7y ago

I don't understand your comment. So was your friends book not DRM'd or how could people share it illegally?

docker_up 7y ago
There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.

na85 7y ago

Perhaps he should publish his next book in dead-tree format.

docker_up 7y ago
It was in dead-tree format only.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  So are you suggesting authors shouldn't sell hard-copy books, because they don't have DRM? I am REALLY confused as to what you are advocating.

rahimiali 7y ago

Does your friend get royalty for each copy of the book? Could your friend have negotiated an upfront fee from the publisher and no royalty? This way, only the publisher would be exposed to piracy risk, a risk it can manage much better than an author ever could.

rhinoceraptor 7y ago

Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.

SkyBelow 7y ago
>$200 each Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.
- nvusuvu 7y ago
  Has the price changed recently?
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    Yes, it's inflated. Looking up a selection of my engineering textbooks from junior and senior year at my alma mater, where I remember new list prices of $150-200 and used prices of $100-150 per course in books they now add up to a typical $250 list new. However, there are a lot of ebook options now for $50-100 per course. Books that can stop working, as crazy as the linked tweet thread acknowledges. Books that will not be available on my bookshelf if I want to keep them for reference in the future. And there's still piracy. I expect the ebooks will make this more and not less popular; a lot of pirated textbooks were...allegedly....low-quality scans when I was in college.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Pirated textbooks are better than the ebook even. I wonder how they are sourced, because they are clean proofs even with markings where the binding obscures the pages when printed as a textbook. Must be from someone with access to those raw files. Plus, they are PDFs, and not clunky slow ebook files of varying proprietary format and offline availability. Textbook prices correlate with federal loan amounts. Publishers probably take the same % of that loan limit to price their books, so ironically the tools designed to help make education affordable are being exploited to make education unaffordable.
- 7y ago

noonespecial 7y ago

At this point we've seen this play out so many times that using DRM to "stop piracy" is like tossing the virgin into the volcano to stop the eruption. Yes losing all of those pretty girls sucks but so do volcanoes destroying the village...

tomxor 7y ago

Most authors of anything other than best selling trash don't make anything worth caring about. Almost all the money goes to publishing, including ebooks. Does piracy still suck?

satysin 7y ago

So what you're saying is the mechanism they put in place to prevent your friends book from being pirated failed within months? Yet all those who purchased it legally could one day be left with having their purchase shut off? They might be lucky and get refunds but they still lose access to the book. To me that seems like an utter failure for everyone.

docker_up 7y ago
There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  So.. I am confused what your point is? DRM wouldn't have helped this situation, which I think actually HELPS the case against DRM... it only hurts legitimate readers, pirates would have gotten it anyway.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  What was the price of this. book? Numerous engineering texts run $100s, some north of $1,000. Pure rent-seeking. Reasonable pricing has proved the best piracy.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I a word: "piracy deterrent ".
- harshreality 7y ago
  Can you disclose which textbook it was? I'm curious. Was it a good textbook? The textbook market is a predatory scheme to fleece money out of students who are usually pretty close to broke, by making the books more important even than healthy food. Not releasing a new edition every few years would have the same effect as "piracy", once the used market is large enough to supply each new class. Professors and professionals who write textbooks should treat them as a marketing and career advancement exercise. Write a good book, get noticed by tenure committees or potential consulting clients. Most people who write books like that already have relatively secure jobs, and the book, if it's not awful, improves their career trajectory even more. It builds their reputation or brand. It's tough to side with them over broke college students slavishly scanning thousand-page textbooks while eating ramen.

docker_up 7y ago

The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?

NoodleIncident 7y ago
Maybe that's because these sob stories were already accounted for by the _original_ copyright length of 28 years? The vast majority of DRM is protecting some corporation's right to profit off of the work of content creators almost indefinitely.
- dageshi 7y ago
  Most DRM is there to protect it during the initial sales window when demand and awareness of the product are at their highest.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    So why not release a DRM-free version after that window? I'd be happy to wait 6 months to buy a movie if that's what it took to get a DRM-free copy.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    Citation needed. It seems very clear from the history of copyright law that the whole thing is just a money grab.
    - dageshi 7y ago
      I'm not talking about copyright law, I'm talking about DRM. Go look at the videogame industry and denuvo. They use it because it's hard to crack during the initial sales window, once it gets cracked usually after a couple months they patch it out and don't bother to replace it because its job is done.

warp_factor 7y ago

Paying for books is the old model. I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
> I will gladly donate Everyone says. Nobody does.

Miner49er 7y ago

DRM isn't the answer. It's always been trivial to break DRM on e-books, and I wouldn't be surprised if DRM actually increases pirating. Why buy something that restricts your ability to use it and is inconvenient when you can pirate a version that doesn't do that?

shawnz 7y ago

> It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free. It's unfair? Sounds like a dream come true to me, I'd love for my work to have such incredible reach. Is your friend starving, or living on the street or something?

justinmeiners 7y ago

This definitely sucks. Why do you think people are buying this book? Is it required for a course? When there is a book I need, but don't want, I'll get by with a PDF. When its a book I want, I buy the real thing, because I enjoy having it. Just curious, what the intended use of the book is, and whether you think a similar attitude might have had any effect.

asdff 7y ago

Who do you think pirates textbooks? Chances are, your friend would have made dimes per book while the publisher pulled $180 a pop from broke indebted students trapped in a captive market. Textbooks have gotten so costly because students are just the publisher's delivery device for the huge amounts of federal loan money awarded every year.