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This only works because there's a captive audience, and the publisher knows that they can get away with charging anything since the students feel they have no o
by jey 12y ago
This only works because there's a captive audience, and the publisher knows that they can get away with charging anything since the students feel they have no other choice but to buy a copy. Far more specialized textbooks with far smaller audiences are routinely available for much cheaper (e.g. http://amzn.to/1ByBDLG http://amzn.to/1ByBDLG).
The right place to target reform would be professors. They should take a stand to write and use only open textbooks that can be freely downloaded and distributed. This is already common at the research level, but it doesn't seem as common for intro textbooks.
- personlurking 12y agoDo you or does anyone know if there's any kind of existing market for pirated textbooks? I'm not a student but if music and films are pirated in large doses, it seems textbooks geared towards the same demographic would be popular.
- evincarofautumn 12y agoYes, textbook piracy is commonplace. When I was a student, I always pirated the textbooks that I could, using the student file sharing service at my university or the Pirate Bay. Eating food and saving my parents’ money were more important to me than having dead-tree copies of textbooks that I would use for ten weeks then never read again.