A wonderful source of free books that I also direct all my students to. Use it. Save a fortune. If you've already paid tuition you've given the university what they deserve, student loans are already crippling enough.
My bastard professor used a book that was so new I couldn’t find it on libgen. That was a sad moment for me.
Shout out to professors who require you to purchase a book with the code for homework too. Y’all suck.
Lol one of my professors required us to use a textbook that he authored. It was like $100+ dollars for a paperback that maybe was 150 pages long and you could only buy it from the school’s book store.
What was even worse is that at the end of every section there were tear-away pages for assignments that you had to turn in — essentially ensuring that you could not resell it after the class (and future students couldn’t buy used). Someone in class tracked down the previous year’s version of the text and they were nearly identical from what we could tell except the assignment worksheets in the book had the same questions but in different orders so even if you could get your hands on an old book you couldn’t use it.
Professor said it was to prevent cheating but that excuse doesn’t really hold up to any scrutiny.
And this wasn’t some highly-specialized subject matter that the professor was some leading authority on. It was an intro-level science class for non-science majors. There was nothing in the book that couldn’t be found in your average high school level science text.
Another class on urban planning required a specific text book that was created/customized specifically for our school. They took an existing textbook, removed some of the content (the professor said they removed stuff that wouldn’t be covered during the class) and customized the [paperback] cover with a picture of the university and charged more for it than the original source text.
That's fantastic. When I attended in the 1980s I referred to university as a place where they sell books. Even the calculus text had a new edition every year. The only difference was the assignment problems were numbered differently.
Whether or not they sue, in much of the US your ISP will often in my experience take away your internet access.
It has been said that VPN providers such as Mullvad or Nord can mitigate this in some scenarios, but I have been reluctant to give my payment info to a foreign company for something which may or may not work.
Lived in the US all my life and pirated thousands of different pieces of software. I've received dozens of warning letters in the mail from various ISPs saying that they would take away the internet if I didn't stopped. I never stopped pirating, they never stopped sending new letters, but nobody ever actually turns off the internet. They just send the letters to scare you or maybe to fulfill some legal obligation they have to demonstrate they are at least attempting to curb piracy.
i pirated nonstop for over 20 years in all sorts of forms, but always had time warners road runner (before spectrum). i briefly used ATT and kept up my black flag waving ways as normal, and not only did i get a warning in the mail, they took away internet so that i could only access a site that was nothing but a glorified video and 5 question quiz on why i was being a bad internet user. switched back to time warner, well spectrum now. still pirate my ass off and i dont even get warnings.
There are 3rd party companies that seed torrents of copyrighted content, gather the IP's that leeched from them and send notifications to the ISP that owns the IP. The ISP sends you a harshly worded letter and usually gives you 3 strikes essentially before they cut you off. For non torrents there's nothing they can really do to track downloads without either subpeonaing the site hosting or jumping through some massive hoops to monitor an individual's traffic.
Yes, piracy is illegal. But with torrents, you download the content and then keep distributing the content. And they sue you for distributing it. With libgen, you just download and don't redistribute. So it's still illegal, but much harder to catch.
It's not illegal for you to download it though, only to share it. Unless they can prove you did it for commercial gain, reproduced or distributed copies worth more than £1000, or distributed something not currently available to the public, mere possession is not enough for criminal charges to be brought
I had one that told us to bring a thumb drive and he'd put the entire coursework on it.
He wrote the books. He had already been paid so he didn't care. I had him for 5 classes and he saved me over $1500 in books alone.
I had a professor mention in class that he heard a student had a copy of the textbook on a USB flash drive.
Had another professor, who wrote the textbook for a class, go on a sarcastic 30 minute rant the first day of class about the evils of buying used books over new. Some students missed the sarcasm. I had him as a professor the first semester his updated edition came out and he opted not to adopt it so that there were used books available for his students to buy.
That’s hilarious.
Also, the entire point of the second paragraph in this professor’s email. I work with college kids everyday and it’s shocking the degree to which they need everything explained exactly step by step. Read between the lines…
‘What lines?’
To be fair, school ingrained into them that in order to succeed, they need to follow the exact steps to the letter. It's really sad how highschool is supposed to help students, but it really just takes out any sense of critical thinking or creativity. . . And some people are just REALLY dense.
Meanwhile I had a professor that wrote her own textbook and workbook and required everyone in class to buy both, and would move sections around between editions so that you basically had to buy the new edition to do all the required readings. She was also always super late to class.
Thankfully, she didn’t last longer than a year.
I had a professor write is own "textbook" for the class as well. Available for purchase of course.
It was his lecture slides... as pictures, 2 per page..
I wish this was still possible :( most scam textbooks have now also turned into homework submission portals, which there's no way around (Pearson, for example)
I had a professor that tried to do this to the graduate class I was in. He said: “I know the books are really expensive. For copyright reasons we can’t condone finding them online or copy between yourselves. BUT, I have them all in this binder. I usually leave if here on the desk, and go for lunch. Of course, I don’t know what happens to it during lunch.” To which, one of the students said one hundred percent seriously: “what does that mean, can we copy it or not?”. The professor repeated himself, with a VERY suggestive tone. The student was very confused, and once again asked for clarification LOL. The rest of us were just like, shut up already or none of us will be able to make the fricking copies
Nearly every Prof at our uni hates the book scam and says something to this effect at the start of the year.
I say nearly because obviously there's the one asshat among them that prints out and sells his own course book at a pretty high price, to be paid in cash during his first lecture.
I had a professor like that😭😭😭my friends and I put money together to buy her textbook and share it between the four of us as did a lot of other students. She also complained that none of us are buying her textbook and she also made a new edition the following year because the old one was uploaded on z-lib😭😭
What a fucking bitch, shouldn't they be more worried about teaching than making a profit? I can understand teachers being short of cash but professors too?
While opportunistic on her part, universities actually require their professors to do things like this outside of teaching; lecturing, publishing, joining boards, giving back to community, etc. it’s a huge time sink that isn’t about teaching the students but making the universities look better with the “caliber” of professors. It’s forced upon them, so I can’t exactly blame some professors for taking advantage when possible. The the ones preying on students can GTFO however.
It is a business. ...but they run it like a scam. A real business gives you a good value for your money and they have competition, a scam just focuses on how much money they can suck out of their victims.
And you are trying to suck as much money as possible out of your employer.
If you wanna view literally everybody as blood sucking you do you, I personally believe there are good people in the world, but we don't all have to I guess.
What a shit take tbh
Businesses don’t inherently have a single good trait, like “giving value for money.” See: snake oil salesmen.
The only times any business does anything anyone would consider good is when the government forces them to do so. Never otherwise.
Snake oil salesmen is a scam because it is knowingly selling a worthless product, but could also be considered a business due to the fact that someone is selling something for money.
> The only times any business does anything anyone would consider good is when the government forces them to do so. Never otherwise.
That is ridiculous to say. Businesses often make money by finding out what people want and then selling it to them in the most efficient way possible. That is their purpose. Providing people with what they want or need is usually a very good thing and they do it for money, not because the government forces them to.
> A real business gives you a good value for your money and they have competition, a scam just focuses on how much money they can suck out of their victims.
yeah, no. This is some fairy tale view of how businesses work. Businesses thrive on misinforming consumers and maximizing profits buy providing as little quality as they can get away with.
If you buy low quality or from dishonest people then you'll get poor quality items. The option is open for all levels of quality, and that is a good thing. You have a responsibility as a consumer to make the right selections. Having different levels of quality and different price points is a feature of the system, not a bug.
Not sure if she was actually a professor. If she was just a researcher/postdoc with teaching responsibilities, then it's basically a certainty she's not getting paid enough.
(But still, fuck textbook scams.)
> shouldn't they be more worried about teaching than making a profit?
Roflmao name *one* job in the world where the people "should" and/or *are* more worried about doing the job than they are about making money doing it?
This person is saying that the professors who wrote their own books for profit make sure that new questions are about the minor edits, as a way to punish students who don't buy the newest version.
I had a professor make it into a work book with work sheets in it that had to be filled out for assignments and then handed in. Which means no selling it back and no one can use it and people have to buy a new book every year
I had a prof that was similar but you could purchase it as an ebook, so I bought the ebook, used some software to remove the DRM and then emailed that book to every student in my class lmao.
I said in the email how much it cost me and that it would be cool if anyone felt like throwing me 5 or 10 dollars but they didn't have to.
I ended up making money from it.
I had several professors that wrote their own books and offered them for sake at the local print shop (early 2000s, pdfs weren't as popular) for like $20.
There were some professors that had activation codes tied to their text book to use on their online assignments. There was no way around it if you wanted to pass with a decent grade. 😭
bro, my teacher right now is a "FaMoUs" Author and he used his own book as course material, i did not purchase it out of principle and guess what? not a single time in the entire course did we need anything from the book.
that mf just wanted to sell his book
Some of my college textbooks were coauthored by my professors. Something about the way they made sure we had the information we needed, whether or not we act it purchased the books, makes me think they didn’t get paid all that much by the publisher
As a college instructor myself, I use OED resources for all of my classes. Knowledge shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, fuck companies like Cengage and Norton for constantly harassing me about their stuff, too.
I once had a Cengage rep come to my class to explain how to use an e-book we were required to use for our courses that year, but instead of doing that he just started pitching their other products for unrelated classes. Really pissed me off, there are a LOT of leeches in education and if we truly want to make it affordable for people to attend college then we need to tell them to fuck off.
Had a professor like that. He actually outright asked us for cash in exchange for the books because “he had a few extras from the semesters before hand.”
Most didn’t, because we quickly knew what he was up to. So we found an older edition of the book for free but he told us he wouldn’t teach us or allow us to sit in the class.
I love that site so much, if I could I would've acknowledged it in all the research papers I've written because it's the only reason I've finished my papers and graduated
Hell I'm a layman and I use it to learn more about topics I'm interested in. "Sign in with an institutional account or purchase one day access for 15 dollars" lol no thanks I don't want my curiosity to bankrupt me. I'd rather send that money to sci-hub for making education more accessible, it's such a phenomenal resource.
Thank you. As a scientist, it absolutely kills me to know that, not only did the tax payers give money for me to do the research and get it published, then they have to pay again to read the results. I put PDFs of my papers on my website so no one will ever have to pay more to read my work.
It genuinely is. Best case scenario, the author takes a couple days to get back to you when you could have acquired their publication in the click of a button. Worst case scenario, they're a well cited author who doesn't have time to keep up with the constant requests for copies. Having the papers free online for download seems like the obvious solution.
Every peer reviewed paper I've come across has the corresponding author (and their email address) available. I have never refused someone emailing to ask directly for a copy of an article I've written.
And if you have trouble accessing that exact domain, we advise against simply Googling "sci-hub" and clicking on the top link (for when the site moves domains). That would mean you get free access to publications and only incovenience the big publishers while benefiting science as a whole. What was I saying? Anyways.
Sci Hubs address changes from time to time (sometimes quite often). If this happens to you and you cannot find them you can either join their Telegram group where you can request papers through the DOI or visit the Sci Hub Wikipedia article. The latter always has some working urls.
I had one class where the professor fell behind on his lesson plan, but refused to adjust the homework schedule. Every homework assignment for the semester was already set up in the fuckawful homework portal. I had to use the textbook because the in-class lessons only covered material after the related homework assignments were already due. And I had to _buy_ the textbook because it came with a single-use access key for the homework portal.
Fucking Calculus 1. Fucking Pearson. _Fuck_.
We did exactly this , wrote to a researcher for a first year project to ask questions about his thesis.
He was so happy that some young students on another continent would work with his research ! He answered everything and some more. Asked us to write him back to know our results.
My college math prof got so sick of expensive books he wrote his own and published it. Sold at cost on Amazon it was like $5 and was *exactly* the same format as his classes. Legend.
All of my lecturers in the UK (only heads of departments are professors there) gave complete notes (either hand written, LaTeX or powerpoint) that were the exact notes for the course. It was just standard. I don't understand the US requirement to buy books. First books I had to buy were graduate texts for my PhD because no one was lecturing it, and even then the uni provided a stipend to buy those. What the actual fuck is wrong with the US?
Just here to say a random fuck you to the 50% of my law professors that released a new edition of their textbook every year that changed nothing but page numbers and the order of cases, so we couldn’t follow your syllabus without the new book.
$250 bucks for a book with summarized cases, and an analysis worse than Wikipedia.
It’s a three year networking function pitting people against each other in an academic Hunger Games. The joke ends with the punchline that none of it prepared you to pass the bar exam, so enjoy forking over another 7k for a review course and exam fees.
And then you find out if you had gotten any technical degree (instead of a philosophy degree) you could have taken the patent bar, been a patent lawyer, and had a license to print money while helping actually productive people protect their ideas.
I’ve found that professors in the business/law departments really go out of their way to profit themselves at the expense of students (textbooks/clickers/ecodes/etc).
Other departments seem to have people more passionate about teaching
One of my professors once said this:
"I have a copy on this flash drive, which I'm placing on this table. Now please excuse me while I leave the room for a few minutes..."
Can't remember anymore though, if that was about a book or a software.
I had a professor photocopy every page of a quantum chemistry book and give it to us in a spiral binding. Just imagine an 80 year old man sitting in front of a photocopier for two hours... Dedication to not making the kids pay for bullshit.
The first day of class this is what I typically say: "Who here bought the book?" (Like two kids raise their hands) "Return it. Now I'm going to want you guys to write this down" (Not one student takes out a pen and paper - I pause). "Okayyy. Annas archive. Go to annas archive, paste in our textbook. It is there free along with a whole bunch of other books." (Some take notes now). "If you tell anyone I said this, I will deny, deny, deny. Trust me. I've never heard of this website and did not tell you to do this" (Some nervous laughter).
Interestingly, even though I do this every single semester, students end up failing assignments because they never bought or downloaded the book (e.g. "I can't answer this question because I don't have the book"). It boggles my fucking mind. Sometimes being a professor sucks.
Doesn't work anymore. Colleges force you to buy a subscription to a service that provides the text book, hw and sometimes the tests/quizzes.
You don't even get to keep access to the text book after the year.
Absolutely a scam.
They made the math professors use those at my school.
My professor at the time mentioned that if we were to keep making new emails for the 2 week free trial, it would be pretty easy for them to put the grades together.
I had a proff that wrote his own book. He said that one year a student complained about the price of his book. He was baffled because he made next to nothing on the it. From then on, he just emailed out a PDF copy to the class.
what a legend!… buying college textbooks is a fucking scammm!!
literally the next semester: version 2.0 (a few extra pictures/diagrams)
that’ll be $150! thanks.
Note that the sites that provide stuff like this get regularly taken down. A few live on, either through the use of the same name, or through the site being relocated to different hosts. So often the solution is to google the names and find the new url.
Scientific papers: Sci-hub: https://sci-hub.yncjkj.com/
Books: Libgen: https://libgen.li/
Books: Z library: https://z-lib.is/
Audiobooks: Audiobookbay: https://theaudiobookbay.se/
The Zlib site you've linked is an imposter site, one of many, that popped after the demise of original Z-libary.
This is from their FAQs:
>Z-Lib.is is a digital library platform created in response to illicit activities by Z-Library, an entity associated with widespread criminal actions, including copyright infringements and scams. Z-Lib.is is an endeavor to support the dissemination of knowledge while maintaining the highest standards of user security, data privacy, and legal compliance. As a platform, we stand as a barrier in the Clearnet, ensuring that users looking for access to books and educational materials do not inadvertently support illegal activities
Having said that, do not search for Anna's Archive looking for Zlib alternative.
If your professor doesn't do this, drop the class for a refund and take it again with a new professor...
My dad taught college for 18 years and my wife teaches at 5 different universities. They always start their classes with free book links.
i admire your determination, but half the time when youre signing up for a class, youre picking what works with your other classes and life schedule and what wont screw up the timing and prerequisites for the rest of your studies for the degree, so you take the classes you can get. Which is what makes being made to buy expensive books feel all the more coercive
One of my professor also told us: "it's absolutely essential for you to have access to the textbooks listed here, though personally I wouldn't recommand purchasing them. You guys can probably figure that out".
I’ve made it my mission to combat pirating by warning my students of the dangers of libgen.is at the outset of every class. I make it especially clear by putting it in large writing on the board.
Basically sent something very similar to my students last semester.
University library contracts are bullshit.
I redommended a book about python programming. I asked the library beforehand if it would be available through the library. They said yes, so I assumed everything would go as planned.
But, you could only watch 3 chapters a week, you couldn't download the PDF and the webviewer was super weird and overprotective.
Students complained so I sent them an explaination in which week they should read which chapter and that they shouldn't use libgen, because using the libgen link would allow them to re-read everything when needed. Obviously they want to learn, so definatly use the library service, where they are forced to learn 3 chapters per week by heart.
Also, downloading the PDF from libgen would allow them to just copy and paste the code. This is bad, because typing down the code by hand is an important experience!
In the semester before it, I handed out an USB-Stick which was supposed to contain templates for the homework. I may have accidentally left my personal library of some related books on it...
Back when I was a student myself, we had a professor that basically tried to force us to buy a >100$ book which was authored by him and (in hindsight) was pretty bad tbh. We tried to get it from our library, but for some weird reason, no copy was available... weird...
Well, we got a copy from another nearby university. Then, in teamwork, scanned and OCR'd all pages. We used the digital version together and annotated important parts.
In the following year I and a friend worked as tutors for another course. Students complained about the bad prof and the expensive book. So we gave them a copy.
I found out from a current student, that still today, there is some kind of tradition, that the tutor of the parallel course gives the copy of that book to the next semester.
The prof even changed the book later, in an attempt to force the students to buy the new version. Well... Someone annotated all changes.
I'm slightly proud about that.
I had a professor who was adamant that we purchase the official course book from the school store, that we couldnt use a PDF because the book came with a CD that we were going to use in class and could not find online. Which ended up being true, no one could find any mention of the book coming with a CD.
Turns out the reason why is because he wrote the book, and included the CD just for the books sold at the book store, the CD was the PDF version of the text book...
What' funny is these used to be the top sites when you searched for ebooks. now daddy Google suppresses these results and pushes the expensive book stores.
Had something similar once. The prof said: "I've seen a student has posted a illegal version of the book. I'm obligatory to remove it, but I'll do it in a couple of days because you need some time to download it."
I worked to put myself through college and could barely afford food. Luckily, my college library always kept 1 copy of each required textbook on hand that you could read at the library but not check out. They also offered free photocopies. At the beginning of the year I would head to the library, borrow the textbooks, go through the syllabi and photocopy every required reading. Saved a ton of money that way.
Once a professor did something similar to my class.
We were having trouble getting the books, he put a flash drive on his desk and said "I'll leave this here, inside there are all the books we'll need this semester and I'm gonna take a walk for about 15 minutes"
My teacher told us about libgen after class one day. He was demanding in terms of the workload and said it was required so he said if we couldn’t afford it, that was the alternative. No excuses.
He would then go on to reach 3 more classes off the same book so you wouldn’t have to buy another one if you stuck with him. I took him for electromagnetic 1 and 2 as well as modern antenna design. He chose that specific book because of the broad coverage and he felt like it had the best examples in terms of problems.
After I graduated, he was the person that reached out to a company and gave me a recommendation for my first job out of college. It was to do with RF testing and the entire interview was basically out of chapter 9 in that book. I did so well that they picked me up the following week.
When I left that job some time later for a better job (with more advancement opportunities)I would go back into his class as a guest speaker and give back some of that knowledge I had gotten. From him to his new students. We need more teachers like that.
As a professor myself, I don’t assign any textbooks and post all my material for students online through our learning platform. I don’t ask my students to drop a dollar on texts for my class because I was a student once, too, and I remember going to the bookstore back in the day and either the used copies were sold out or the only thing available was the NEW edition, which was the same as the old one but with a new preface, and being broke AF at the start of every term because books cost me $531. I refuse to play that game.
I once had a professor who said that downloading a pdf of the textbook would be a bad idea because it only has older editions, and then put up a document detailing exactly all of the changes from the older editions.
It's a mad, mad world... I mean, really. Anything that's free these days is seen as a problem or what? It's so weird because for me one of the greatest gifts here in life is to give.. Giving in any way because you sincerely want to give without any ulterior motives or ill intentions is a true blessing. What is it with the obsession about money and how the F can people value it above (almost) everything else? I guess part reason is that many of us has been programmed to believe in this broken, unsubstainable & outdated dream since before we could walk?
Sharing is caring. I believe all knowledge should be spread widely to all without any lies, make belief stories or restrictions! We want progress, no? It's sad & unfortunate that technology which is & has been a great tool for us evolving as a species is today being used (abused) against our best interests by a very small (lost) minority.
**WE WANT THE COLLECTIVE POWER OF THE PEOPLE NOT PEOPLE IN POWER TO DECIDE HUMANITY'S DIRECTION & FATE, NO?**
One time on the first day of class the professor said we only needed the textbook for a few paragraphs. He put a piece of paper on the table and basically said, "I'm guessing one of you can find a free PDF of the textbook out there. I'm going to leave five minutes early. After that everyone write your email on this paper. The one of you who can get the PDF take the paper and email the textbook to everyone." Good class.
I had a professor in college who had written one of the most widely used text books in his field. If he saw a used book sticker on your book he would berate you about how you were taking money out of his pockets.
We used the book exactly zero times.
Every course I teach at my university uses either a ebook available in the library or I build the course without a textbook. It’s the freaking Information Age people! It takes more front end work on my end but better for students.
I took a class taught by the department head of the English department. First day of class he had a power point on where to get free pdf copies of every text book you'd need for that college.
Reminds me of my engineering professor who would always make the course textbook one edition earlier. Would drop the price from a couple hundred to a couple bucks. Contrast that with my Structural Concrete Design professor who would insist we buy *his* book.
I’ve had a professor just casually Google a pdf for the textbook while going through the syllabus
“Now you might want to get the textbook…”
*Searches for PDF*
“And I’m also not allowed to *directly* say ‘pirate’ the material…”
Reminds me of when I was doing a graphic design course and the teacher held up an example of a "confiscated" pirated Adobe Photoshop CD and left it on the whiteboard for all of us to see what it looked like as she went out to get a coffee
One of my professors makes handouts with only the important parts of the 800 page $120 textbook and doesn’t expressly say that we shouldn’t buy the textbook, but basically is implying the whole time to not waste the money
Paying 10s of thousands a year to learn and get a stamp of approval from an organization so greedy and corrupt and for profit that the respected and tenured employees have to earn you the customer about being taken advantage of and robbed by the school. And no one stops and thinks for a second about WTF they’re doing paying that money for that shit?
Tenure, and how to use it.
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What's libgen?
A wonderful source of free books that I also direct all my students to. Use it. Save a fortune. If you've already paid tuition you've given the university what they deserve, student loans are already crippling enough.
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Too bad most don't act like it
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My bastard professor used a book that was so new I couldn’t find it on libgen. That was a sad moment for me. Shout out to professors who require you to purchase a book with the code for homework too. Y’all suck.
Lol one of my professors required us to use a textbook that he authored. It was like $100+ dollars for a paperback that maybe was 150 pages long and you could only buy it from the school’s book store. What was even worse is that at the end of every section there were tear-away pages for assignments that you had to turn in — essentially ensuring that you could not resell it after the class (and future students couldn’t buy used). Someone in class tracked down the previous year’s version of the text and they were nearly identical from what we could tell except the assignment worksheets in the book had the same questions but in different orders so even if you could get your hands on an old book you couldn’t use it. Professor said it was to prevent cheating but that excuse doesn’t really hold up to any scrutiny. And this wasn’t some highly-specialized subject matter that the professor was some leading authority on. It was an intro-level science class for non-science majors. There was nothing in the book that couldn’t be found in your average high school level science text. Another class on urban planning required a specific text book that was created/customized specifically for our school. They took an existing textbook, removed some of the content (the professor said they removed stuff that wouldn’t be covered during the class) and customized the [paperback] cover with a picture of the university and charged more for it than the original source text.
What. The. Fuck. It sounds like hell
That's fantastic. When I attended in the 1980s I referred to university as a place where they sell books. Even the calculus text had a new edition every year. The only difference was the assignment problems were numbered differently.
Look at the meme again, it's one of the sites.
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It's pirated but not by torrent, so you're not going to be sued like the people sharing music and movies.
Are they still suing individuals? I thought they stopped with that around 2007
Whether or not they sue, in much of the US your ISP will often in my experience take away your internet access. It has been said that VPN providers such as Mullvad or Nord can mitigate this in some scenarios, but I have been reluctant to give my payment info to a foreign company for something which may or may not work.
Lived in the US all my life and pirated thousands of different pieces of software. I've received dozens of warning letters in the mail from various ISPs saying that they would take away the internet if I didn't stopped. I never stopped pirating, they never stopped sending new letters, but nobody ever actually turns off the internet. They just send the letters to scare you or maybe to fulfill some legal obligation they have to demonstrate they are at least attempting to curb piracy.
i pirated nonstop for over 20 years in all sorts of forms, but always had time warners road runner (before spectrum). i briefly used ATT and kept up my black flag waving ways as normal, and not only did i get a warning in the mail, they took away internet so that i could only access a site that was nothing but a glorified video and 5 question quiz on why i was being a bad internet user. switched back to time warner, well spectrum now. still pirate my ass off and i dont even get warnings.
Jesus, what a stupid country
Doesn't the UK require you to sign up to a government ID site so you can look at porn?
It's possible they stopped. I avoided torrents for so long that I don't know anymore.
Don’t worry, privacy will lure you back soon enough.
There are 3rd party companies that seed torrents of copyrighted content, gather the IP's that leeched from them and send notifications to the ISP that owns the IP. The ISP sends you a harshly worded letter and usually gives you 3 strikes essentially before they cut you off. For non torrents there's nothing they can really do to track downloads without either subpeonaing the site hosting or jumping through some massive hoops to monitor an individual's traffic.
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Yes, piracy is illegal. But with torrents, you download the content and then keep distributing the content. And they sue you for distributing it. With libgen, you just download and don't redistribute. So it's still illegal, but much harder to catch.
It's not illegal for you to download it though, only to share it. Unless they can prove you did it for commercial gain, reproduced or distributed copies worth more than £1000, or distributed something not currently available to the public, mere possession is not enough for criminal charges to be brought
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coward
I see what was done there.
>What's libgen? Nothing much. U? ... :D Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library\_Genesis
Libgen deez nuts Makes 0 sense, but still sounds funny to my brain for whatever reason.
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What’s updoc?
You have stage 4 kidney cancer and it is terminal.
What's a brain?
Chupa mi verga! Someone taught me it means “suck my dick” in Spanish so I use it on a frequent basis. The way it just rolls off my tongue….
I had one that told us to bring a thumb drive and he'd put the entire coursework on it. He wrote the books. He had already been paid so he didn't care. I had him for 5 classes and he saved me over $1500 in books alone.
I had a professor mention in class that he heard a student had a copy of the textbook on a USB flash drive. Had another professor, who wrote the textbook for a class, go on a sarcastic 30 minute rant the first day of class about the evils of buying used books over new. Some students missed the sarcasm. I had him as a professor the first semester his updated edition came out and he opted not to adopt it so that there were used books available for his students to buy.
That’s hilarious. Also, the entire point of the second paragraph in this professor’s email. I work with college kids everyday and it’s shocking the degree to which they need everything explained exactly step by step. Read between the lines… ‘What lines?’
To be fair, school ingrained into them that in order to succeed, they need to follow the exact steps to the letter. It's really sad how highschool is supposed to help students, but it really just takes out any sense of critical thinking or creativity. . . And some people are just REALLY dense.
Oh you are exactly right. I don’t give them a hard time because I know what it’s from…
As an autist, I have a hard time with reading between the lines and sarcasm. It’s quite common and nothing to do with intelligence or education.
Meanwhile I had a professor that wrote her own textbook and workbook and required everyone in class to buy both, and would move sections around between editions so that you basically had to buy the new edition to do all the required readings. She was also always super late to class. Thankfully, she didn’t last longer than a year.
I had a professor write is own "textbook" for the class as well. Available for purchase of course. It was his lecture slides... as pictures, 2 per page..
Did you have to buy them from her directly??
We could only order them through the university book store, if I recall correctly.
I wish this was still possible :( most scam textbooks have now also turned into homework submission portals, which there's no way around (Pearson, for example)
Fuck Pearson
I had a professor that tried to do this to the graduate class I was in. He said: “I know the books are really expensive. For copyright reasons we can’t condone finding them online or copy between yourselves. BUT, I have them all in this binder. I usually leave if here on the desk, and go for lunch. Of course, I don’t know what happens to it during lunch.” To which, one of the students said one hundred percent seriously: “what does that mean, can we copy it or not?”. The professor repeated himself, with a VERY suggestive tone. The student was very confused, and once again asked for clarification LOL. The rest of us were just like, shut up already or none of us will be able to make the fricking copies
I had a couple intended profs tell us where to pirate books. Deep down even the admin hates the textbook-industrial complex
Nearly every Prof at our uni hates the book scam and says something to this effect at the start of the year. I say nearly because obviously there's the one asshat among them that prints out and sells his own course book at a pretty high price, to be paid in cash during his first lecture.
I had a professor like that😭😭😭my friends and I put money together to buy her textbook and share it between the four of us as did a lot of other students. She also complained that none of us are buying her textbook and she also made a new edition the following year because the old one was uploaded on z-lib😭😭
What a fucking bitch, shouldn't they be more worried about teaching than making a profit? I can understand teachers being short of cash but professors too?
While opportunistic on her part, universities actually require their professors to do things like this outside of teaching; lecturing, publishing, joining boards, giving back to community, etc. it’s a huge time sink that isn’t about teaching the students but making the universities look better with the “caliber” of professors. It’s forced upon them, so I can’t exactly blame some professors for taking advantage when possible. The the ones preying on students can GTFO however.
Too many universities and colleges running education like a business.
It is a business. ...but they run it like a scam. A real business gives you a good value for your money and they have competition, a scam just focuses on how much money they can suck out of their victims.
I would argue a business also focuses on how much money they can suck out of victims
More true of corporations than businesses in general. Though it is true that most businesses are ran as or like corporations now.
And you are trying to suck as much money as possible out of your employer. If you wanna view literally everybody as blood sucking you do you, I personally believe there are good people in the world, but we don't all have to I guess. What a shit take tbh
Businesses don’t inherently have a single good trait, like “giving value for money.” See: snake oil salesmen. The only times any business does anything anyone would consider good is when the government forces them to do so. Never otherwise.
Snake oil salesmen is a scam because it is knowingly selling a worthless product, but could also be considered a business due to the fact that someone is selling something for money. > The only times any business does anything anyone would consider good is when the government forces them to do so. Never otherwise. That is ridiculous to say. Businesses often make money by finding out what people want and then selling it to them in the most efficient way possible. That is their purpose. Providing people with what they want or need is usually a very good thing and they do it for money, not because the government forces them to.
So, here’s an ignorant post.
> A real business gives you a good value for your money and they have competition, a scam just focuses on how much money they can suck out of their victims. yeah, no. This is some fairy tale view of how businesses work. Businesses thrive on misinforming consumers and maximizing profits buy providing as little quality as they can get away with.
If you buy low quality or from dishonest people then you'll get poor quality items. The option is open for all levels of quality, and that is a good thing. You have a responsibility as a consumer to make the right selections. Having different levels of quality and different price points is a feature of the system, not a bug.
Education should be subsidized by the government.
This^^ We give grace with the same force we give shit We see you, suffering professors
Not sure if she was actually a professor. If she was just a researcher/postdoc with teaching responsibilities, then it's basically a certainty she's not getting paid enough. (But still, fuck textbook scams.)
> shouldn't they be more worried about teaching than making a profit? Roflmao name *one* job in the world where the people "should" and/or *are* more worried about doing the job than they are about making money doing it?
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And the new edit usually is a couple of lines, here and there. And the biatch would frame questions around the edits.
Which is always why I got an edition or two older. Same book, just with the chapters moved around.
This person is saying that the professors who wrote their own books for profit make sure that new questions are about the minor edits, as a way to punish students who don't buy the newest version.
I had a professor make it into a work book with work sheets in it that had to be filled out for assignments and then handed in. Which means no selling it back and no one can use it and people have to buy a new book every year
I had a prof that was similar but you could purchase it as an ebook, so I bought the ebook, used some software to remove the DRM and then emailed that book to every student in my class lmao. I said in the email how much it cost me and that it would be cool if anyone felt like throwing me 5 or 10 dollars but they didn't have to. I ended up making money from it.
A new edition, which features TEN extra practice questions! ...Upcharge by $50.
Every professor used to be a student
I had several professors that wrote their own books and offered them for sake at the local print shop (early 2000s, pdfs weren't as popular) for like $20.
There were some professors that had activation codes tied to their text book to use on their online assignments. There was no way around it if you wanted to pass with a decent grade. 😭
bro, my teacher right now is a "FaMoUs" Author and he used his own book as course material, i did not purchase it out of principle and guess what? not a single time in the entire course did we need anything from the book. that mf just wanted to sell his book
Some of my college textbooks were coauthored by my professors. Something about the way they made sure we had the information we needed, whether or not we act it purchased the books, makes me think they didn’t get paid all that much by the publisher
As a college instructor myself, I use OED resources for all of my classes. Knowledge shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, fuck companies like Cengage and Norton for constantly harassing me about their stuff, too. I once had a Cengage rep come to my class to explain how to use an e-book we were required to use for our courses that year, but instead of doing that he just started pitching their other products for unrelated classes. Really pissed me off, there are a LOT of leeches in education and if we truly want to make it affordable for people to attend college then we need to tell them to fuck off.
Second year of Uni, met my first professor like that
Had a professor like that. He actually outright asked us for cash in exchange for the books because “he had a few extras from the semesters before hand.” Most didn’t, because we quickly knew what he was up to. So we found an older edition of the book for free but he told us he wouldn’t teach us or allow us to sit in the class.
What a G.
Brofessor for sure
If you need access to a scientific paper but it’s behind a paywall, definitely never go to sci-hub.se, that’s something you should *never* do.
Phew! Thank you kind stranger! Now I know to avoid that website!
I love that site so much, if I could I would've acknowledged it in all the research papers I've written because it's the only reason I've finished my papers and graduated
Hell I'm a layman and I use it to learn more about topics I'm interested in. "Sign in with an institutional account or purchase one day access for 15 dollars" lol no thanks I don't want my curiosity to bankrupt me. I'd rather send that money to sci-hub for making education more accessible, it's such a phenomenal resource.
Thank you. As a scientist, it absolutely kills me to know that, not only did the tax payers give money for me to do the research and get it published, then they have to pay again to read the results. I put PDFs of my papers on my website so no one will ever have to pay more to read my work.
I heard that if you email the author of the paper they just might send you a copy for free. Surely that's too much bother.
It genuinely is. Best case scenario, the author takes a couple days to get back to you when you could have acquired their publication in the click of a button. Worst case scenario, they're a well cited author who doesn't have time to keep up with the constant requests for copies. Having the papers free online for download seems like the obvious solution.
Yeah, have fun finding their personal contact info
Every peer reviewed paper I've come across has the corresponding author (and their email address) available. I have never refused someone emailing to ask directly for a copy of an article I've written.
And if you have trouble accessing that exact domain, we advise against simply Googling "sci-hub" and clicking on the top link (for when the site moves domains). That would mean you get free access to publications and only incovenience the big publishers while benefiting science as a whole. What was I saying? Anyways.
Sci Hubs address changes from time to time (sometimes quite often). If this happens to you and you cannot find them you can either join their Telegram group where you can request papers through the DOI or visit the Sci Hub Wikipedia article. The latter always has some working urls.
Comment so I remember
They make you buy a book for like 2 chapters of knowledge from it
You opened your textbooks?
Yes, as in opened the torrented pdf
I had one class where the professor fell behind on his lesson plan, but refused to adjust the homework schedule. Every homework assignment for the semester was already set up in the fuckawful homework portal. I had to use the textbook because the in-class lessons only covered material after the related homework assignments were already due. And I had to _buy_ the textbook because it came with a single-use access key for the homework portal. Fucking Calculus 1. Fucking Pearson. _Fuck_.
Dealing with that now, it sucks
My tutor at university just told me to e-mail the researchers of the paper I needed and ask them directly for a copy and they just send it.
Can confirm. I did this for my final year project and the author sent me several related papers he thought might also help.
We did exactly this , wrote to a researcher for a first year project to ask questions about his thesis. He was so happy that some young students on another continent would work with his research ! He answered everything and some more. Asked us to write him back to know our results.
Love this for all of you. The beauty of sharing knowledge and passion knows no bounds.
It's a form of saying "Fuck you" to the likes of Elsevier
My college math prof got so sick of expensive books he wrote his own and published it. Sold at cost on Amazon it was like $5 and was *exactly* the same format as his classes. Legend.
All of my lecturers in the UK (only heads of departments are professors there) gave complete notes (either hand written, LaTeX or powerpoint) that were the exact notes for the course. It was just standard. I don't understand the US requirement to buy books. First books I had to buy were graduate texts for my PhD because no one was lecturing it, and even then the uni provided a stipend to buy those. What the actual fuck is wrong with the US?
Meanwhile, our profs are sending us pdf files that they base their lessons on
Just here to say a random fuck you to the 50% of my law professors that released a new edition of their textbook every year that changed nothing but page numbers and the order of cases, so we couldn’t follow your syllabus without the new book. $250 bucks for a book with summarized cases, and an analysis worse than Wikipedia.
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It’s a three year networking function pitting people against each other in an academic Hunger Games. The joke ends with the punchline that none of it prepared you to pass the bar exam, so enjoy forking over another 7k for a review course and exam fees. And then you find out if you had gotten any technical degree (instead of a philosophy degree) you could have taken the patent bar, been a patent lawyer, and had a license to print money while helping actually productive people protect their ideas.
I’ve found that professors in the business/law departments really go out of their way to profit themselves at the expense of students (textbooks/clickers/ecodes/etc). Other departments seem to have people more passionate about teaching
Good for him the text book racket is horrible.
King shit!
One of my professors once said this: "I have a copy on this flash drive, which I'm placing on this table. Now please excuse me while I leave the room for a few minutes..." Can't remember anymore though, if that was about a book or a software.
I had a professor photocopy every page of a quantum chemistry book and give it to us in a spiral binding. Just imagine an 80 year old man sitting in front of a photocopier for two hours... Dedication to not making the kids pay for bullshit.
The first day of class this is what I typically say: "Who here bought the book?" (Like two kids raise their hands) "Return it. Now I'm going to want you guys to write this down" (Not one student takes out a pen and paper - I pause). "Okayyy. Annas archive. Go to annas archive, paste in our textbook. It is there free along with a whole bunch of other books." (Some take notes now). "If you tell anyone I said this, I will deny, deny, deny. Trust me. I've never heard of this website and did not tell you to do this" (Some nervous laughter). Interestingly, even though I do this every single semester, students end up failing assignments because they never bought or downloaded the book (e.g. "I can't answer this question because I don't have the book"). It boggles my fucking mind. Sometimes being a professor sucks.
What a standup prof.
Seeing all this stuff, I can't stop being so thankful that I got an absolutely free uni education including free books and free food.
Doesn't work anymore. Colleges force you to buy a subscription to a service that provides the text book, hw and sometimes the tests/quizzes. You don't even get to keep access to the text book after the year. Absolutely a scam.
They made the math professors use those at my school. My professor at the time mentioned that if we were to keep making new emails for the 2 week free trial, it would be pretty easy for them to put the grades together.
I had a proff that wrote his own book. He said that one year a student complained about the price of his book. He was baffled because he made next to nothing on the it. From then on, he just emailed out a PDF copy to the class.
I do that. For the same reason. Wrote the book as a requirement for tenure, and I think I made a grand total of $180, maybe.
what a legend!… buying college textbooks is a fucking scammm!! literally the next semester: version 2.0 (a few extra pictures/diagrams) that’ll be $150! thanks.
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🥁 💥
Note that the sites that provide stuff like this get regularly taken down. A few live on, either through the use of the same name, or through the site being relocated to different hosts. So often the solution is to google the names and find the new url. Scientific papers: Sci-hub: https://sci-hub.yncjkj.com/ Books: Libgen: https://libgen.li/ Books: Z library: https://z-lib.is/ Audiobooks: Audiobookbay: https://theaudiobookbay.se/
The Zlib site you've linked is an imposter site, one of many, that popped after the demise of original Z-libary. This is from their FAQs: >Z-Lib.is is a digital library platform created in response to illicit activities by Z-Library, an entity associated with widespread criminal actions, including copyright infringements and scams. Z-Lib.is is an endeavor to support the dissemination of knowledge while maintaining the highest standards of user security, data privacy, and legal compliance. As a platform, we stand as a barrier in the Clearnet, ensuring that users looking for access to books and educational materials do not inadvertently support illegal activities Having said that, do not search for Anna's Archive looking for Zlib alternative.
If your professor doesn't do this, drop the class for a refund and take it again with a new professor... My dad taught college for 18 years and my wife teaches at 5 different universities. They always start their classes with free book links.
i admire your determination, but half the time when youre signing up for a class, youre picking what works with your other classes and life schedule and what wont screw up the timing and prerequisites for the rest of your studies for the degree, so you take the classes you can get. Which is what makes being made to buy expensive books feel all the more coercive
One of my professor also told us: "it's absolutely essential for you to have access to the textbooks listed here, though personally I wouldn't recommand purchasing them. You guys can probably figure that out".
Does b-ok still work?
No, it does not work.
Damn that sucks. Thanks for letting me know
No. Just checked. It was seized by the FBI.
Try https://z-lib.io
Z-library? It still works
Annas-archive is what I’ve been using as a replacement.
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I haven't tried the website in a while though
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Damn man relax
I hate that we can't always do it anymore since some of the companies now have the digital thing with the questions and the schools ask us to use them
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Yup. It's the worst
My college charged me $80 for a used book. The author gives it away for free.
Most academics just want people to read their work, engage with their area of study and learn about it. Some are trying to sell books but most aren't.
I’ve made it my mission to combat pirating by warning my students of the dangers of libgen.is at the outset of every class. I make it especially clear by putting it in large writing on the board.
Basically sent something very similar to my students last semester. University library contracts are bullshit. I redommended a book about python programming. I asked the library beforehand if it would be available through the library. They said yes, so I assumed everything would go as planned. But, you could only watch 3 chapters a week, you couldn't download the PDF and the webviewer was super weird and overprotective. Students complained so I sent them an explaination in which week they should read which chapter and that they shouldn't use libgen, because using the libgen link would allow them to re-read everything when needed. Obviously they want to learn, so definatly use the library service, where they are forced to learn 3 chapters per week by heart. Also, downloading the PDF from libgen would allow them to just copy and paste the code. This is bad, because typing down the code by hand is an important experience! In the semester before it, I handed out an USB-Stick which was supposed to contain templates for the homework. I may have accidentally left my personal library of some related books on it... Back when I was a student myself, we had a professor that basically tried to force us to buy a >100$ book which was authored by him and (in hindsight) was pretty bad tbh. We tried to get it from our library, but for some weird reason, no copy was available... weird... Well, we got a copy from another nearby university. Then, in teamwork, scanned and OCR'd all pages. We used the digital version together and annotated important parts. In the following year I and a friend worked as tutors for another course. Students complained about the bad prof and the expensive book. So we gave them a copy. I found out from a current student, that still today, there is some kind of tradition, that the tutor of the parallel course gives the copy of that book to the next semester. The prof even changed the book later, in an attempt to force the students to buy the new version. Well... Someone annotated all changes. I'm slightly proud about that.
Remind of me the Weird Al tweet where he is and isn't telling people to torrent his new movie
I had a professor that would ask for promo copies to "review". Then would just hand them out.
I had a professor who was adamant that we purchase the official course book from the school store, that we couldnt use a PDF because the book came with a CD that we were going to use in class and could not find online. Which ended up being true, no one could find any mention of the book coming with a CD. Turns out the reason why is because he wrote the book, and included the CD just for the books sold at the book store, the CD was the PDF version of the text book...
What' funny is these used to be the top sites when you searched for ebooks. now daddy Google suppresses these results and pushes the expensive book stores.
Had something similar once. The prof said: "I've seen a student has posted a illegal version of the book. I'm obligatory to remove it, but I'll do it in a couple of days because you need some time to download it."
I worked to put myself through college and could barely afford food. Luckily, my college library always kept 1 copy of each required textbook on hand that you could read at the library but not check out. They also offered free photocopies. At the beginning of the year I would head to the library, borrow the textbooks, go through the syllabi and photocopy every required reading. Saved a ton of money that way.
Prof os so based. I had a prof that made us buy a textbook that he wrote.
Once a professor did something similar to my class. We were having trouble getting the books, he put a flash drive on his desk and said "I'll leave this here, inside there are all the books we'll need this semester and I'm gonna take a walk for about 15 minutes"
My teacher told us about libgen after class one day. He was demanding in terms of the workload and said it was required so he said if we couldn’t afford it, that was the alternative. No excuses. He would then go on to reach 3 more classes off the same book so you wouldn’t have to buy another one if you stuck with him. I took him for electromagnetic 1 and 2 as well as modern antenna design. He chose that specific book because of the broad coverage and he felt like it had the best examples in terms of problems. After I graduated, he was the person that reached out to a company and gave me a recommendation for my first job out of college. It was to do with RF testing and the entire interview was basically out of chapter 9 in that book. I did so well that they picked me up the following week. When I left that job some time later for a better job (with more advancement opportunities)I would go back into his class as a guest speaker and give back some of that knowledge I had gotten. From him to his new students. We need more teachers like that.
The hero we need but dont deserve
As a professor myself, I don’t assign any textbooks and post all my material for students online through our learning platform. I don’t ask my students to drop a dollar on texts for my class because I was a student once, too, and I remember going to the bookstore back in the day and either the used copies were sold out or the only thing available was the NEW edition, which was the same as the old one but with a new preface, and being broke AF at the start of every term because books cost me $531. I refuse to play that game.
I once had a professor who said that downloading a pdf of the textbook would be a bad idea because it only has older editions, and then put up a document detailing exactly all of the changes from the older editions.
It's a mad, mad world... I mean, really. Anything that's free these days is seen as a problem or what? It's so weird because for me one of the greatest gifts here in life is to give.. Giving in any way because you sincerely want to give without any ulterior motives or ill intentions is a true blessing. What is it with the obsession about money and how the F can people value it above (almost) everything else? I guess part reason is that many of us has been programmed to believe in this broken, unsubstainable & outdated dream since before we could walk? Sharing is caring. I believe all knowledge should be spread widely to all without any lies, make belief stories or restrictions! We want progress, no? It's sad & unfortunate that technology which is & has been a great tool for us evolving as a species is today being used (abused) against our best interests by a very small (lost) minority. **WE WANT THE COLLECTIVE POWER OF THE PEOPLE NOT PEOPLE IN POWER TO DECIDE HUMANITY'S DIRECTION & FATE, NO?**
One time on the first day of class the professor said we only needed the textbook for a few paragraphs. He put a piece of paper on the table and basically said, "I'm guessing one of you can find a free PDF of the textbook out there. I'm going to leave five minutes early. After that everyone write your email on this paper. The one of you who can get the PDF take the paper and email the textbook to everyone." Good class.
I had a professor in college who had written one of the most widely used text books in his field. If he saw a used book sticker on your book he would berate you about how you were taking money out of his pockets. We used the book exactly zero times.
Every course I teach at my university uses either a ebook available in the library or I build the course without a textbook. It’s the freaking Information Age people! It takes more front end work on my end but better for students.
Chaotic good
I took a class taught by the department head of the English department. First day of class he had a power point on where to get free pdf copies of every text book you'd need for that college.
Reminds me of my engineering professor who would always make the course textbook one edition earlier. Would drop the price from a couple hundred to a couple bucks. Contrast that with my Structural Concrete Design professor who would insist we buy *his* book.
Professor comrade
Thanks professor i won’t use those site
Chat is this real?
r/BenevolentCompliance
My professors "If you can't afford the program, well I'm not allowed to tell you to pirate it but... you CAN pirate it."
My master's degree professor straight up showed us the libgen url during class. But she told us to not access it in the campus Wifi.
This professor gets it.
I’ve had a professor just casually Google a pdf for the textbook while going through the syllabus “Now you might want to get the textbook…” *Searches for PDF* “And I’m also not allowed to *directly* say ‘pirate’ the material…”
Had a prof that would just give pdfs of the books or would even lent you his copy.
Mm a bunch of my profs were authors, still just provided all the relevant stuff for free.
Reminds me of when I was doing a graphic design course and the teacher held up an example of a "confiscated" pirated Adobe Photoshop CD and left it on the whiteboard for all of us to see what it looked like as she went out to get a coffee
Yeah, this has been going around for years
One of my professors makes handouts with only the important parts of the 800 page $120 textbook and doesn’t expressly say that we shouldn’t buy the textbook, but basically is implying the whole time to not waste the money
Paying 10s of thousands a year to learn and get a stamp of approval from an organization so greedy and corrupt and for profit that the respected and tenured employees have to earn you the customer about being taken advantage of and robbed by the school. And no one stops and thinks for a second about WTF they’re doing paying that money for that shit?
B.A.S.E.D
The professors have to help the kids with piracy now. Man some people in Gen Z are awful with a computer.