The textbook industry is on a similar ethical level as the Chinese fentalogue export industry. Not quite as evil as the American health insurance industry, but close. There are definitely situations where the ethics of piracy/file sharing are murky, but the only complaint I have about Z-Library and LibGen sharing textbooks is that it's probably not enough to put them completely out of business. Pirate harder.
The US textbook industry that is. UK univesities often don't have required textbooks for courses at all (instead you get things like PDF notes being provided directly to students, and often with printed copies subsidised too), and where they do older editions are almost always acceptable (unless it's a course in a subject that moves very quickly where the older edition would genuinely be outdated), and there will usually be some copies available in the library too.
It was next door to the main faculty building and they could pirate any textbook you needed. You didn't even need to know the name of the book, you could just say "I need the book for so and so professor's so and so class" and they'd print it out for you. All the source files were already on their copy machines' hard drives.
While technically illegal, this was fully endorsed by faculty and administration in the "If you need books, don't go next door and print them there. Under no circumstances are you to do that. Again, don't under any circumstances go next door and ask for these books at 5 cents per page. And whatever you do, do _not_ ask for 2 pages per page in tiny print to make it cheaper"
Same in Italy when I was a student some twenty years ago.
Noticeably, this was done at multiple print shops in the university area, and you could get a discount or a free copy if you brought the original when a new book was chosen.
The whole academic establishment basically was aware of this, except for a few professors who insist on selling their own book, but it's typically in humanities or social sciences.
copyright oligarchs are ruthless. in Tunisia we had UN supported "Tunis model law on copyright for developing countries" since 1967 which includes provisions against copyright for teaching, research and health.
Fun story, I had a professor in university that tried to force us to buy his own book for his course, refusing to provide notes or any other free alternatives, and for the final exam he allowed anyone to bring in his book.
We complained to the school board as this was unfair and there was a conflict of interests, the exam was redone by a committee and a new professor replaced him the next year.
Damn. Early in my college years I took a course from a lecturer who made us buy not one but two useless books of his (each on its fifth edition or so). The bookstore was owned and operated by the college, so I didn't even bother to complain.
I ran into a situation where a graded component of a course required buying the textbook by the lecturer. It involved an online testing service through a company owned by the lecturer. I raised a complaint with the university pointing out it was against policy along with the conflict of interest, was forced to transfer to a section led by another lecturer (same course, different textbook, considerably worse lecturer), and the university never bothered doing anything about it.
Same here. Most profs had their own condensed script that they just handed out to us. And if a topic was more complex it had a reference to well-known books that we could use if we were interested.
Or if we were really required to buy a book, it usually was like a really good 30$ book that we could use as reference for the whole degree.
It is a shame on US law enforcement. It is an example of how corrupt or bad the system is. There are so many petty crimes law enforecement don't bother to give a shit but when it comes to accessing knowledge (legal or illegal) ,they come in full force. It is just ridiculous on how much priority and impotance they put in these things compared to other crimes. It is because they are corrupted by the influence of the industries or money. Democracy at it's worst.
We had a single professor in first year in a UK university ask us to buy his book, but it was £10, no biggie. The rest of the material was always available online in .pdf, or pre-printed for you to collect
In my university in France (small engineering school), usually teachers would just give printed notes to the students. The few rare times where a textbook was required, the library bought one copy for each student so we could just borrow them.
It’s different in Europe, but you still need a book once in a while when doing a degree. And it’s insane to expect students to part with a three-figure number for a book.
I have physics, math and chemistry books from 30+ years ago that are not lacking at all in content. I truly do not understand why it is that, in the US, most science books aren't 100% free all the way from K through graduate school.
In fact, my kids have used my old books to help them with AP Physics in high school. They tell me they like the lower content of distracting color-filled "circus acts" (as they call it) and better explanations.
How much of the math, physics and chemistry has changed? I would guess, depending on stage of learning and subject, somewhere between 0% and 10% (with 10% possibly being an exaggeration). It is nothing less than ridiculous that students have to buy books on Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus, etc. for $60 or more.
This is the kind of thing that really gets me going about just how badly our system of education has derailed in some areas. Most school books, at a national level, should be freely available and used year over year, preferably in electronic form.
What is wrong with a, let's call it, federally publish set of books covering the sciences and other subjects? They could be evolved over time.
I know these things exist in various forms, we simply don't seem to lay down the law and use them. CK-12 used to be about books, now they seem to have expanded beyond that:
“Federally publishing” books seems like it would be left to the lowest bidder and the results would be terrible. I took a government class recently that used one of the mentioned open textbooks and it was great.
The private, for-profit results are already bad. The formatting is uniformally terrible, the writing is hit and miss. I like some of the open stuff as it is web formatted as opposed to paper formatting, which is the same motif that digitized textbooks use, which is both absurd and frustrating, not to mention DRM readers with shit functionality and bad or absent in-text linking and zero interactivity. It just paints "RENT SEEKING" all over the industry as a whole. However there are some publishers that make nice barebones texts and offer them in unlocked pdfs at economical rates, a real godsend.
The people I really appreciate are the pedagogues on YouTube who make world-class materials for "free". Shout out to Dennis Davis:
openstax is working on that too, for general college and AP subjects.
They're getting assigned in some courses, but I think most professors are happy assigning commercial textbooks, often knowing that they can be pirated and that most students will pirate them.
What's the justification for a professor to assign openstax Calculus instead of Stewart, for instance, other than to make a political statement?
It won't matter in another few years once teaching AIs, a hybrid of LLMs and knowledgebases and logical inference engines, can take the place of textbooks and teachers for non-specialized fields. That'll be able to handle almost all K-12 and lower level college subjects, and teach better than most human teachers. Traditional education may not matter by then, though, depending on what AI does to society.
Certainly. My two annoying experiences from college where buying the used text book for Biology which was a 2nd edition and about 5 years old for probably $80. Then a couple of years later I was in Calculus I and the syllabus listed Thomas' Calculus (12th Edition) as the book. It was brand new just released so no used copies. Bookstore had it for $220 and the 11th edition for much cheaper. I took the risk and bought the 11th edition. I mean after 11 editions how different could the 12th edition be?? On the first day of class noticed the person next to me has the 12th edition, I asked to see it to compare and to my horror it was completely different. Not wanting to get behind in class, I quickly found it on amazon for $140 and I had just got the student version of Prime for like $25 per year so got free 2 day shipping. Ultimately, never used the book for the calculus class. Teacher either gave us a printout of homework problems or wrote the problems on the board for us to copy. Auctioned it on Ebay after the class. The seller then filed a claim against me:
"Hello, I received this book today and it is definitely not in "like new" condition; the eBay condition definition for "like new" states that the "cover has no visible wear", but this textbook's cover is very worn on both front and back. The cover corners are bent inward, there are scuffs on the upper edges like it had been dragged upside down, and there's even a tear on the bottom of the back cover! It's incomprehensible how you could list this book as "like new," according to eBay's definitions, this book is closer to "Very Good", or even "Good" condition."
Note the "damage" they speak of came from amazon shipping it to me and it sliding around in the box. I responded:
"Sorry for the misrepresentation of the book. $71 is a very good price for the book. I was hoping to get above $110 for it. Because of the great deal you have gotten, I hesitate to offer a partial refund for the book. Will a partial refund be necessary? Otherwise, I will be more careful next time."
Lame.
The point about the biology book though, I just find it ironic that biology is always changing, but the Biology book was old and never updated while a math book seems to get re-written in a different permutation every two years.
Requiring an up to date textbook for math is just absurd. Pretty much anything you learn on an undergraduate math course hasn't changed for 100 years (and that's definitely true of Calculus I material).
My math profs warned us that, while the overall contents and concepts included were the same, the different editions of the textbook sometimes had chapters in a slightly different order and problems slightly rearranged. This meant it was possible to learn from any edition, but only the required edition was guaranteed to work for assigned problem sets.
Why didn't he just scan at least the assigned problem sets into a PDF? Do they require you to buy a brand new book just so the question numbers they pass match?
I'd bet publishers won't do additional print runs on those and might even recall copies not yet sold when the new edition comes out so availability of those will go down (and prices up) if they are made the desirable edition.
Really the prof should just make his own assignments (or rather have his underlings do it). At least that's how it works on this side of the pond. In any case, requiring additional purchases of educational material when students are already paying tuition is absurd.
I just talked to other kids and we pooled money to buy the book and then photocopy it. It was rampant piracy. I think we might have then either sold the book (likely) or returned it (unlikely) after photocopying it.
It taught me that there are limits to my ethics. Knowing full well that I am violating a social contract that many others are abiding by, I still did it. If I can act on this particular line, then it's just a matter of degree between me and those who more egregiously violate our shared rules.
After all, we had a massive advantage against kids who worked hard to afford the books. Even if they made $15/hr (outrageous), they would still have spent 10 hours on that book alone.
I'm not sure whether I agree or not, but as a reference point, Socrates comes to mind - should he have stolen off with Crito instead of taking the hemlock?
Shipping damage != like new. The ebay buyer was right to complain and that the damage came from Amazon and not you is irrelevant to the buyer. Would you be happy about undisclosed defects on a $71 purchase?
The entire textbook industry is run by cheap-jack mafiosi, and their "executives" should be reminded of this and shamed at every opportunity. Of course, I'm not claiming this would be effective since these people have no shame.
US textbook: In this 16th edition we improved all the problems and nothing else is new. By the way what means by "improved", it means that changing exercise 2.11 from "10x+2y" to "11x+2y".
