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knowledge should be free (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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But college textbooks are absurdly expensive. Can anyone point me to some options for digital textbooks that don't have stupid drm?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you can't find a textbook on LibGen or Zlibrary, hit me up. I'm good at sourcing pirated textbooks.

Sometimes I can only find earlier editions or, for example, the international edition rather than the Canadian-specific edition that your course has instructed you to buy but 95% of the time those special editions and the newer editions are just a reworked version of the exact same content.

It's actually a racket where courses will tell students to buy the most recent edition of a textbook to actively discourage students from buying second-hand textbooks of the previous edition for fear that they're getting out of date information when actually all they do is update the pictures, change the cover image, amend typos, and occasionally they'll shift the content around a bit of update the little case studies that reinforce the learnings from the chapter in order to keep them relevant to today.

But the actual core of the content is almost always identical/virtually identical.

So yeah, let me know if you need help with sourcing any textbooks or other books.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Messaged!

I'm well aware of the racket. I recently returned to college after 15 years of working, and I knew back then how the racket worked. It's only gotten worse. The extra injury is that one of these texts is for an introductory course that goes into less detail than any decent youtube series. I understand most people won't be going into a course of study after a decade of personal interest in the subject, but even freshman students in a STEM subject shouldn't be this ignorant. Looking ahead at the syllabus and powerpoints, I learned all of this in middle school.