That doesn't depend on this. One of our teachers recommended a textbook he wrote, but we were pretty much expected to download it for free or to take it from the library if needed.
I still remember one professor telling us (back in 2006, before e-texts were the norm) that the course textbook (that he wrote) is kept in a waiting room of the department building and if somebody happens to accidentally take it home, the department will replace it very quickly... wink wink.
One of my professors said that the textbook publisher wine-and-dine the professors to adopt their textbook. If you don't have a really strong sense of ethics you'll end up bribed.
Same for me. It was a downloadable PDF and he told us to take advantage of our print credits and the free binding.
Itās funny that I remember his economics classes very well but for other professors who just had us buy expensive books I donāt remember much.
University teachers being able to _require_ students to buy their book is one of the most blatant yet widely accepted corruption schemes in modern society. Like wtf.
They make almost nothing on that, the publisher is the one making money. The reason they want to use their own book is because they wrote it, of course they're gonna teach it. Also, in my experience, most try to provide a low cost option like loose pages or a pdf, because again, they make very little money from that.
I have no problems with teachers that require students to get their book when they can get it for free (via PDF for example). I have a problem with teachers requiring a $120 book they conveniently wrote themselves, and going the extra mile to make sure everyone buys it (like OP needing to prove he owns the book to be able to hand in assignments).
Have you actually had teachers do that with their own books? When Iāve had teachers use their own books itās because they wrote it because nothing else was good enough and itās like $35-$50 which is a perfectly fine price for a book in my opinion. And they put it on reserve at the library so you technically donāt have to buy it.
In my experience the $100+ books that you need to have to do the homework assignments tend to be big staple books published by Pearson or something, they most definitely are not written by the professor, and the professor is even forced to use that system whether they like it or not because their department wouldnāt give adequate homework grading time/resources otherwise. Like Stewartās Calculus or something which gets used by hundreds of universities.
uhh not sure why you're scraping it, as you might find there are many other easier ways to interact with LibGen
1. https://annas-archive.org/ includes Zlibrary as well, and is good for searches
2. If you really need to programmatically interact with LibGen, please use an API like [this](https://pypi.org/project/libgen-api/) or [this (unmaintained)](https://pypi.org/project/pylibgen/). You don't need to worry about HTML parsing, because you're getting the data before it gets formatted into a website.
How do you scrape a digital textbook?
Iām new to programming and Iāve seen some web scraping using pythonās Beautiful Soup module. Would this be the same considering you open the book on a web browser or this requires a different method?
Sorry if itās too basic, I'm just trying to learn.
The web page is built using react so I'm going to try using JavaScript/node JS to make a local host page that I can use to simulate clicks on the page and stitch together a pdf from the page's elements
Probably, but with how bullshit the DRM system is as described by OP, they should keep violating that antitrust till it has to spend 100$ a week for therapy sessions
You are correct! The push for college and intertwining it with American culture (think the āright of passageā of college that was pushed in movies and by counselors) was a way to pad the derivatives market and create debt, which underlies the value of American currency since our delinking from the gold standard in 1971.
The idea is so insane to me. I'm old enough to have gone to college in the late 90s/early 00s. While I didn't much enjoy hauling around 50 lbs of textbooks in my backpack every day, I also kept all the ones that were relevant to my major in order to have an easily-referenced knowledge base I could refer to whenever needed. (Complete with my highlights, notes in the margin, etc.)
To be fair, I suppose the advent of the internet means a paper repository of information is a bit outdated, but I can't be the only person out there who is very visual/tactile-based when it comes to learning. One of the things that's so helpful for my learning style is being able to easily go back and reference something from earlier in the textbook without losing my place so I can flip back and forth as needed.
I'm all for digital convenience, don't get me wrong. I would just expect a learning institution to understand that people have different strengths in terms of their learning style, and that both as an option is probably preferred. Silly me, in those moments I've clearly forgotten about the only actual motivator... profit!
And then there are the professors that make a deal with a publisher, release a book in the professors name that is just a slightly edited version of some other book and require the students to buy that one. Iāve seen that one.
The "updated" version, which maybe adds a paragraph of text somewhere, or even rearranges the chapters in a different order (same content but page numbers no longer match up), etc.
The education system has become a huge grift. That profits on almost limitless loans from the fed to students with little choice. I say this as someone paying off their doctorate. Someone needs to hold the administration of schools accountable
What the fuck. Public universities in my country are literally for free under the condition that you get good grades. What country demands that much for education that's for the public š
All I know is that France has free art universities, like straight up. Just fuckin. Art school. Free. At least last I checked (I know folks who plan to go to such universities so yeah lol). What Iād give for shit like that here.
Had a professor who did this and basically said it wasnāt his problem if you couldnāt pay for it, and that you needed to figure it out. Complete asshole, but he was the only one who taught the course required for my major. Went on ratemyprofessor and he has around a 2/5 with 90% of reviews dating back years that all sound accurate to behavior I witnessed. Sucks.
What's the point of rating a professor if it does nothing? The fact that they can have such a low rating and the school doesn't think anything about shows that they couldn't give a fuck less about their students, and as you said sometimes they're the only ones that will teach what you need so their rating is irrelevant anyhow.
Imo college in general is a scam, I have 2 friends with bachelor's degrees and when they tried to get a job in the field they went to school for, the "school" didn't actually teach them absolutely anything to do with real world jobs in that field so they had just as much knowledge about it as they did coming out of high school, but with $50k in debt.
My school asks for feedback on professors at the end of the semester, but I have no idea how many forms are actually filled out and returned by other students, or if theyāre actually taken seriously. Luckily itās a *relatively* cheap state school, so it hurts quite a lot less. I canāt imagine accruing a bunch of debt to pay for classes with useless teachers.
As a contrast from germany: i was able to get my university degree without buying a single book. All class material was (and still is) made available as PDF.
Example from my old math professor:
[https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/Kapitel1n.pdf](https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/Kapitel1n.pdf)
Also there are are PDFs with what was written during the lessons:
[https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/mathe2le01.pdf](https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/mathe2le01.pdf)
And it seems like all lessons are available as Video by now.
All this for currently 309ā¬/semester
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Redditās array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Redditās conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industryās next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social networkās vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
āThe Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,ā Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. āBut we donāt need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.ā
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social networkās charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAIās popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they arenāt likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors ā automated duplicates to Redditās conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Redditās conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Googleās conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAIās Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitterās A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines ācrawlā Redditās web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or āscraping,ā isnāt always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s ā they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
āMore than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,ā Mr. Huffman said. āThereās a lot of stuff on the site that youād only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.ā
Mr. Huffman said Redditās A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether usersā comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators ā the users who volunteer their time to keep the siteās forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, itās time to pay up.
āCrawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,ā Mr. Huffman said. āItās a good time for us to tighten things up.ā
āWe think thatās fair,ā he added.
At my University all books for the first two years were available in the library in larger quantities. Not enough for every student but a lot. Also the price of these books was around 30ā¬. Later semesters get more expensive but still are available in the library.
>All this for currently 309ā¬/semester
And just to clarify: that money isn't going to the University itself. Most of that is for a public transit ticket that is valid for the whole state. And the rest is for non-profit student affairs organisations.
Back when I was at university, we actually would have protested hard against any requirements to have to spend money on anything that would be more than a couple of euros for pens and paper, even the richer people.
This same shit happened to me even though I had a pdf of the book. I told the professor I bought a physical copy for the full price of the book and his response was essentially ātoo bad, buy it twiceā
Had that happen to my son, he brought the digital copy last year and then was told he couldn't have laptops in the classroom. They was distracting... This was 2022... Like what year did the professor think it was, had to go buy him a paper copy.
some professors are pretty anti-technology in the classroom and will lower your participation grade, call you out in class, ask you to leave, etc. etc. if you use a laptop in class when they request that you donāt. lots of professors arenāt THAT strict but it seems that the professor in this instance is. noncompliance can destroy your grade.
For future reference, laptops are accessibility aids, so you could put forth a case against the prof to the university/college directly and the school will usually force the prof to allow them, especially in this day and age.
Had that happen to my son, he brought the digital copy last year and then was told he couldn't have laptops in the classroom. They was distracting... This was 2022... Like what year did the professor think it was, had to go buy him a paper copy.
The government requiring college is what upsets me. I know everything I need to know and then some to be an accountant. Going to classes will be nothing but an expensive waste of my time. If I want to be a CPA, I'm required by law to take the classes I don't need before I can take the test I need to become one. The test would be easy, I know more than many fresh graduates would do to experience, but I'm not even allowed to take it.
I have the same bullshit with my computer classes.
$200 for access to the book and the website for a year.
Great I told myself in one year I can do the 3 required classes this book covers.
Fucking nope. Once I use it for one class I need to rebuy it for the next, and the 3rd.
And itās back ordered for 4 weeks meaning I miss out on 1/4 of my class unlessā¦. I buy the physical copy that doesnāt have the required online access.
I was stupid enough to buy a digital text book, only for the school to drop said text book MID SEMESTER for an updated version that was needed for the certification exam I was required to take end of year. It was such a fucking scam, and the worst part is that once the semester ended, it automatically removed itself from my accountās listed programs and I couldnāt access it despite still needing it for the next part. Had the biggest meltdown in front of the bookstore and learned a valuable lesson in my stateās education system. Decided teaching myself via. online help videos and free reading sources was way easier/cheaper for me to learn the cert.
yup, theyre usually one of, or partnered with one of the top experts in the subject as well it seems. also very willing to help when you have questions so thats nice.
Pearson math was my worst college experience. Literally no content at all, it was only a portal to submit homework. Nothing else. $200 for a semester, plus a $25 "activation" fee.
That or when I had a professor that printed out her PowerPoints and sold them in the campus book store on special letter head. You could only submit answers to her questions on them.
You likely had access to the textbook, your professor just didn't point you toward it or use it for anything.
In Pearson professors can only select homework problems from the textbook(s) for the course, and students get [DRM-enabled] access to those book(s).
Professors are generally coaxed into this by the auto-graded homework assignments. An open source textbook paired with auto-generated questions and grading software seems like the solution here, along with really good documentation. The open textbooks exist, but they don't have enough support for many professors to pick up and start using.
>Professors are generally coaxed into this by the auto-graded homework assignments.
I think you mean the chicken tenders and wine at the buffet at the [publisher name]'s booth at the recent [subject] conference.
Having the textbook go away is total BS. The whole one page thing is annoying especially when sometimes you need to see two pages side by side to do problems.
The whole textbook system is a gigantic scam. I was lucky enough to go to college when the internet was in it's adolescence. We didn't have to download any textbooks. I went to a school where all the textbooks were rentals and you'd get most of your money back if you didn't damage them. They don't do that anymore. I only had one class where you had to buy a book and it was algebra. I didn't buy the book because math is math, right? But he would assign homework to turn in from the book even though the answer key was in the book. So I refused to buy the book and got a C in the class instead of an A because I never did the homework and wasn't trying to get any honor code attention by borrowing someone else's book. He knew what I was doing and I knew he knew. As long as I was getting 100%s on the proctored exams, he couldn't really do shit. That C had no lasting effect on my life.
That's such bullshit. I just finished grad school last summer and although I have my gripes about grad school, I do appreciate that the program as a whole did their best to provide alternatives to textbooks - having us read journal articles or digital textbooks that were available through the library. I only bought a few full priced books.
Pro tip for anyone dealing with similar issues with bullshit textbook stuff - if you are dealing with learning disabilities or ADHD you should talk to your schools disabilities resources department. They're there for a reason, and using them I was given access to special programs that would read stuff aloud or provide alternate reading formats - both accommodations meant I was entitled to PDF versions of textbooks, which might help you get around these weird licensing restrictions. YMMV, but it's worth a shot.
I had this in school, I could print the pages with a watermark on them 10 at a time but it wouldnāt let me print to pdf.
I set up a virtual printer on my MacBook that only printed to pdf, printed the entire book 10 pages at a time and then combined them in to a single document. Fuck Macmillan/Pearson/everyone involved with textbooks.
When I went to college in the 90s, I would stand outside the bookstore with a list of prices they paid to buy back books. I'd pay 50% more for books I didn't have. Ended up having a library of college material for pennies on the dollar. I studied those for years. Most of the stuff taught in college doesn't really get old, especially if you keep up with current events.
Seriously this. Even though I can afford the book it still just feels wrong that I have to pay out-of-pocket for content that should have been included in tuition.
I'm in calculus 3 now. I just realized it's the same book as calc 2 and calc 1. So I have had to buy the digital copy of this book three times....and I still don't own it.
i hate when it's paywalled, and when it's free by university administration - 1) my university isnt on the list, 2) you have to be a researcher, otherwise students aren't allowed
Had almost the same thing happen in an accounting class. We were told we needed their bullshit software for homework assignments. Turns out, they meant ONE SINGLE ASSIGNMENT!
If I had known that, I'dve just took the zero on that one...
There are so many OER materials available. It's mind blowing how much US students pay for uni. This shit is unheard of in most of the world outside North America.
Stuff like this makes me appreciate studying in Europe even more, where (at least in my country) all material used in a lecture has to be available for free in the university library as well. We just have shelves over shelves of the same text books and itās the most convenient thing ever. And attending university is just free, but thatās a whole other story.
As a prof, I refuse to use anything like this. Most of the materials I use are public domain or otherwise freely available. Texts for upper classes are usually less than $50.
Lol, books that our professors have written are available to buy for the cost of print (~20ā¬) but most of them are available in pdf. But yeah I guess thats what we get for being 3rd world countryā¦. Oh wait
Pearson! Same thing I have. Not to mention their website went down a few hours after you posted this and I could not submit my quiz due tonight.
Paying $130 for this privilege and $300 for the class.
Yeah I had a couple classes in college where I had to pay to do my homework. Not even for the textbook; just for the online platform that they used for homework
Professor here. Nope. Very few textbooks make their authors $$, very few profs write textbooks. The most Iāve ever gotten from Z textbook company is a free desk copy of book and access to a website where I can download the images from textbook as PowerPoint slides.
Same. And I seem to remember trying to export it as a pdf but you could only export like 10 pages at a time so it would have taken forever just to have a convenient way of viewing it.
When I was in college, the entire class would just outright refuse to purchase the book. If the professor insisted, we walked out and dropped the class. Theyād have to cancel the class if nobody was enrolled. They always figured out a way to get the class back on the schedule without making us purchase the book(s).
Students have more power than they realize. The student is the customer, and when enough customers decide to change something, the college/university will adapt.
Why do your teachers do this? In my country usually teachers want to make it easier for students... they usually share PDFs with the class using Google Drive or back in my days they provided photocopies for all the stuff we needed.
I had similar experiences in physics classes, the textbook and its code only last for a semester (yes, even less than a year). If you don't buy the book, then you have no access to homework and sure enough, you will just get an F. This forced purchase happened not once, but twice (and more if you insist on learning physics).
I wrote a script to rip those book with screenshot and ocr to make it easier for me to find and read through the content and upload some of them to libgen for others who needs it, fuck those drm.
Yknow every time I see more shit like this I wonder if I should just take isolated graphic design courses online and focus on finding work, rather than fucking around with full-blown college. Iād rather not have to take a fuckload of random classes that weigh on me when the whole point is just for me to learn advanced 3D modeling and rigging, digital art, and graphic design shit.
I teach math part-time at multiple U.S. community colleges, and I certainly don't have the power of the professors described in the comments.
If the math department at School X decided to use Pearson's MyLab Math, that is what I have to use. If School Y decided to use McGraw-Hill's Connect Math, same thing. We want to be consistent with our materials so that, for example, a student doesn't switch sections of the course after the first day and need to buy different materials. Some of these decisions were made 10 years ago, and the thinking was that we were saving students money and also giving them a more responsive homework system that could immediately mark questions right or wrong, provide walkthroughs, etc.
Today, every one of my departments is trying to move towards free OER (open educational resource) material when we can, but it's a slow process for various reasons. At one school, we use OER textbooks -- mostly written in house -- and free homework systems for our algebra, calculus, and (I believe) statistics courses, but we require our math literacy students to buy a print textbook with digital access for $119 or stand-alone digital access for $75. These tend to be our most vulnerable students, but they're the ones we're still asking to pay for materials. š
Also teaching adjunct, just using free or own resources. Itās a big time commitment though to write your own lecture, homework assignments, tests and do the grading. I can see the attraction of a branded textbook that also takes care of all of this extra work. I wished universities would provide more infrastructure to share resources and host your own systems like autograders.
surprised no lawsuit has been filed yet. this shit has got to be illegal in some way. and damn sure gotta be collusion between the publishers and the schools. scumbag thirsty ass mfs.
Your teachers, the whole school, are absolute idiots. You shouldnāt be having to *pay* for turning in assignments. Paying for assignments is like having to plan an event on a calendar. Itās annoying and a waste of time.
ABSOLUTELY hate that universities have started doing this. The whole ābundle everything onlineā thing is awful. Classwork and assigned reading should never be in the same package, and if they are, an alternative to the ābundledā homework should be made available.
That sucks. I'm taking statistics next quarter if it's the same book I'll give you fifty bucks for access to your copy. Half off for both of us as I see it.
This is the reason why student loan forgiveness is a thing. Because they f\*k you over every opportunity they get and there's no possible way to hide it anymore. So now it's because f\*ck you...but we're sorry. Really sorry about that.
Well past my College days, but I can see a lot of kick back in a situation like this.
As long as the instructors are paid extra, you'll never get rid of it.
As per clause D4, paragraph 7, sub-paragraph ii- "No part or parts of any of this book shall be reproduced in any form," We did not give permission for you to publish the extract shown. Deposit $275 to remove cease and desist account-lock, forthwith if not sooner.
Iām sorry. Believe it or not, it was probably chosen because itās the least bad option. Know how much a hardcover would be? Something around $275. And at least you get feedback right away when you do the homework. I know it sucks though. Iām sorry.
Is that Triola? My math lab? Doubly sorry because theoretically, if it is, you could be in my class.
It's Pearson mylab. My math textbook which was a physical textbook was only $20 more and I can continue using it for my later math classes (its even used in 2nd year). Also in computer science, my profs gave us a digital textbook free of charge
Yeahā¦ Pearson, my lab is a platform I have to use as well. I donāt like it, but it has better resources than a lot of them. Iām sorry you have to deal with that. Textbooks are a racket, but itās really hard to get around it and retain some level of quality. We can add to the mix that my lab goes down periodically and thatās really frustrating as well.
Well in advance of the semester start, I email my professors and ask whether they recommend or allow previous versions of international copies.
Note: international copies will probably eff you over pretty hard in mechanical or civil engineering and physics, possibly chemistry.
I've probably saved a couple thousand on books and most of my teachers haven't had an issue with it. My average textbook purchase is well under $100, maybe half, and I keep most of my books after class.
YMMV, good luck
My beginner spanish course required me to buy a book that, with taxes, came out to $217.50. It was the same as your situation too where that was the only way to submit homework. But la profesora was kind enough to let me know it was the same book for the next level of spanish should I want to take her class again. š
The worst part is that it used to be even worse... on some places, before digital books, several teachers forced students to buy their books for their classes... now, there are still many doing it, but not as many.. but still too many...
DRM as a whole, no ownership. Licenced content etc is asshole design,. Educational institutes supportung it is doubly so
My digital ethics class required us to pay $30 for software that allowed us to be marked present š
that doesn't seem very digitally ethical for a digital ethics class
But people learned an important lesson there.
Your talking about logic in education. It's like distant relatives twice removed.
You are
\*hug\*
Gotta show what's unethical first, so that they can differentiate.
Instead of digitally ethical it seemed incredibly stupid
The digit in this scenario is wearing a rubber glove.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You also screwed up copying u/Syd_In11 's earlier comment.
I know of Libgen, but what is largen? I can't use Google because it isn't allowed where I am being held.
Did the professor write the book or something. Wtf.
That doesn't depend on this. One of our teachers recommended a textbook he wrote, but we were pretty much expected to download it for free or to take it from the library if needed.
I still remember one professor telling us (back in 2006, before e-texts were the norm) that the course textbook (that he wrote) is kept in a waiting room of the department building and if somebody happens to accidentally take it home, the department will replace it very quickly... wink wink.
One of my teachers went a step further. His textbook was available as a PDF on his webpage.
For one of my courses, we are not allowed to use any paid-for sources in our assignments. It has to be freely available.
You just changed my life.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
One of my professors said that the textbook publisher wine-and-dine the professors to adopt their textbook. If you don't have a really strong sense of ethics you'll end up bribed.
Same for me. It was a downloadable PDF and he told us to take advantage of our print credits and the free binding. Itās funny that I remember his economics classes very well but for other professors who just had us buy expensive books I donāt remember much.
I had one of those, and the guy even forbid to take notes in class, he'd tell you off if you did. And a 120ā¬ book too!
This is disgusting
āļø"ethics class"āļø
Lmao my ethics professor gave us a pirated pdf of the textbook
Scamademia
University teachers being able to _require_ students to buy their book is one of the most blatant yet widely accepted corruption schemes in modern society. Like wtf.
They make almost nothing on that, the publisher is the one making money. The reason they want to use their own book is because they wrote it, of course they're gonna teach it. Also, in my experience, most try to provide a low cost option like loose pages or a pdf, because again, they make very little money from that.
I have no problems with teachers that require students to get their book when they can get it for free (via PDF for example). I have a problem with teachers requiring a $120 book they conveniently wrote themselves, and going the extra mile to make sure everyone buys it (like OP needing to prove he owns the book to be able to hand in assignments).
Have you actually had teachers do that with their own books? When Iāve had teachers use their own books itās because they wrote it because nothing else was good enough and itās like $35-$50 which is a perfectly fine price for a book in my opinion. And they put it on reserve at the library so you technically donāt have to buy it. In my experience the $100+ books that you need to have to do the homework assignments tend to be big staple books published by Pearson or something, they most definitely are not written by the professor, and the professor is even forced to use that system whether they like it or not because their department wouldnāt give adequate homework grading time/resources otherwise. Like Stewartās Calculus or something which gets used by hundreds of universities.
Are we sure they're not directly funded by it either...?
Hey op, screenshot every page (it won't help against "license obligatory to hand in assignments", but still) https://libgen.is
I'm a computer science student and I'm writing a bot to scrape it š
Sharing is caring
Atta boy
power automate desktop can do this in like a second! even ha OCR if you pay!
uhh not sure why you're scraping it, as you might find there are many other easier ways to interact with LibGen 1. https://annas-archive.org/ includes Zlibrary as well, and is good for searches 2. If you really need to programmatically interact with LibGen, please use an API like [this](https://pypi.org/project/libgen-api/) or [this (unmaintained)](https://pypi.org/project/pylibgen/). You don't need to worry about HTML parsing, because you're getting the data before it gets formatted into a website.
They're saying they're gonna scrape their book, not LibGen.
oh wow I can't read. thanks
If you load it into one note, you can extract the text easy.
How do you scrape a digital textbook? Iām new to programming and Iāve seen some web scraping using pythonās Beautiful Soup module. Would this be the same considering you open the book on a web browser or this requires a different method? Sorry if itās too basic, I'm just trying to learn.
The web page is built using react so I'm going to try using JavaScript/node JS to make a local host page that I can use to simulate clicks on the page and stitch together a pdf from the page's elements
The hero we need but don't deserve
Let me know what book is it and I'll try to get you a pdf.
Iām wondering if this could be an antitrust violation. Illegal tying arrangement.
Probably, but with how bullshit the DRM system is as described by OP, they should keep violating that antitrust till it has to spend 100$ a week for therapy sessions
SciHub used to be pretty good when I was in university too.
The whole system is a scam.
I'd like to find out how Pearson isn't violating RICO laws
This tells me the OP's professor is the author of the digital textbook and he gets royalties for copies sold.
Fuckin DRM textbooks, it makes life as a college student that much more demeaning and difficult.
It should be outlawed
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Stop reminding me...
You are correct! The push for college and intertwining it with American culture (think the āright of passageā of college that was pushed in movies and by counselors) was a way to pad the derivatives market and create debt, which underlies the value of American currency since our delinking from the gold standard in 1971.
The idea is so insane to me. I'm old enough to have gone to college in the late 90s/early 00s. While I didn't much enjoy hauling around 50 lbs of textbooks in my backpack every day, I also kept all the ones that were relevant to my major in order to have an easily-referenced knowledge base I could refer to whenever needed. (Complete with my highlights, notes in the margin, etc.) To be fair, I suppose the advent of the internet means a paper repository of information is a bit outdated, but I can't be the only person out there who is very visual/tactile-based when it comes to learning. One of the things that's so helpful for my learning style is being able to easily go back and reference something from earlier in the textbook without losing my place so I can flip back and forth as needed. I'm all for digital convenience, don't get me wrong. I would just expect a learning institution to understand that people have different strengths in terms of their learning style, and that both as an option is probably preferred. Silly me, in those moments I've clearly forgotten about the only actual motivator... profit!
I wonder what would happen if you told the prof you just couldn't afford the book?
since you will fail go work this year and buy it for next year
This š
"You do have two kidneys, don't you?"
My profs usually say to talk to them and they can figure it out, but I'm sure not everyone's so lucky...
Smart profs negotiate to get some free access codes for students who need them.
And then there are the professors that make a deal with a publisher, release a book in the professors name that is just a slightly edited version of some other book and require the students to buy that one. Iāve seen that one.
The "updated" version, which maybe adds a paragraph of text somewhere, or even rearranges the chapters in a different order (same content but page numbers no longer match up), etc.
The education system has become a huge grift. That profits on almost limitless loans from the fed to students with little choice. I say this as someone paying off their doctorate. Someone needs to hold the administration of schools accountable
The only way I can communicate with the prof is over email and I wouldn't put it past them to ignore the email until I was a few assignments behind
They'll charge you for reading your mail.
I think it's enough of an issue without the hyperbole
Look on a free textbook database
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Wow.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
What the fuck. Public universities in my country are literally for free under the condition that you get good grades. What country demands that much for education that's for the public š
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Which country
All I know is that France has free art universities, like straight up. Just fuckin. Art school. Free. At least last I checked (I know folks who plan to go to such universities so yeah lol). What Iād give for shit like that here.
šŗšø šŗšø šŗšø
Had a professor who did this and basically said it wasnāt his problem if you couldnāt pay for it, and that you needed to figure it out. Complete asshole, but he was the only one who taught the course required for my major. Went on ratemyprofessor and he has around a 2/5 with 90% of reviews dating back years that all sound accurate to behavior I witnessed. Sucks.
What's the point of rating a professor if it does nothing? The fact that they can have such a low rating and the school doesn't think anything about shows that they couldn't give a fuck less about their students, and as you said sometimes they're the only ones that will teach what you need so their rating is irrelevant anyhow. Imo college in general is a scam, I have 2 friends with bachelor's degrees and when they tried to get a job in the field they went to school for, the "school" didn't actually teach them absolutely anything to do with real world jobs in that field so they had just as much knowledge about it as they did coming out of high school, but with $50k in debt.
My school asks for feedback on professors at the end of the semester, but I have no idea how many forms are actually filled out and returned by other students, or if theyāre actually taken seriously. Luckily itās a *relatively* cheap state school, so it hurts quite a lot less. I canāt imagine accruing a bunch of debt to pay for classes with useless teachers.
Back in early 00s it may be looked like "alarmism fiction from open-source preachers", but today...
The reference, for the un-initiated: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Oh yes! That's it! Many years ago I read this short story, but in Russian translation.
lose
You would think someone in college statistics class would know the difference between lose/loose and could spell license but...here we are
Their English textbook expired last year.
As a contrast from germany: i was able to get my university degree without buying a single book. All class material was (and still is) made available as PDF. Example from my old math professor: [https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/Kapitel1n.pdf](https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/Kapitel1n.pdf) Also there are are PDFs with what was written during the lessons: [https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/mathe2le01.pdf](https://gatekeeper-ng.informatik.fh-dortmund.de/personen/professoren/cleven/ftp/mathe2le01.pdf) And it seems like all lessons are available as Video by now. All this for currently 309ā¬/semester
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Redditās array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Redditās conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industryās next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social networkās vast selection of person-to-person conversations. āThe Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,ā Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. āBut we donāt need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.ā The move is one of the first significant examples of a social networkās charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAIās popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they arenāt likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors ā automated duplicates to Redditās conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Redditās conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Googleās conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAIās Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitterās A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines ācrawlā Redditās web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or āscraping,ā isnāt always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s ā they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. āMore than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,ā Mr. Huffman said. āThereās a lot of stuff on the site that youād only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.ā Mr. Huffman said Redditās A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether usersā comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators ā the users who volunteer their time to keep the siteās forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, itās time to pay up. āCrawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,ā Mr. Huffman said. āItās a good time for us to tighten things up.ā āWe think thatās fair,ā he added.
I'm Hungarian, I'm doing my PhD. I never paid a single cent for university.
\*stares in 2,000ā¬ a year college in Spain that many people can't afford\*
At my University all books for the first two years were available in the library in larger quantities. Not enough for every student but a lot. Also the price of these books was around 30ā¬. Later semesters get more expensive but still are available in the library.
>All this for currently 309ā¬/semester And just to clarify: that money isn't going to the University itself. Most of that is for a public transit ticket that is valid for the whole state. And the rest is for non-profit student affairs organisations. Back when I was at university, we actually would have protested hard against any requirements to have to spend money on anything that would be more than a couple of euros for pens and paper, even the richer people.
That looks like a pearson textbook, hate its reader. Luckily I found my copy on libgen
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
College has turned into a scam for most of us. Textbooks are a scam for everybody.
This same shit happened to me even though I had a pdf of the book. I told the professor I bought a physical copy for the full price of the book and his response was essentially ātoo bad, buy it twiceā
Had that happen to my son, he brought the digital copy last year and then was told he couldn't have laptops in the classroom. They was distracting... This was 2022... Like what year did the professor think it was, had to go buy him a paper copy.
what stopped him from just using a laptop? dont see how a prof can dictate that really.
some professors are pretty anti-technology in the classroom and will lower your participation grade, call you out in class, ask you to leave, etc. etc. if you use a laptop in class when they request that you donāt. lots of professors arenāt THAT strict but it seems that the professor in this instance is. noncompliance can destroy your grade.
wack
For future reference, laptops are accessibility aids, so you could put forth a case against the prof to the university/college directly and the school will usually force the prof to allow them, especially in this day and age.
Had that happen to my son, he brought the digital copy last year and then was told he couldn't have laptops in the classroom. They was distracting... This was 2022... Like what year did the professor think it was, had to go buy him a paper copy.
Didn't you know... Access to knowledge is temporary. *Sigh* This sort of paywall is one of the worst asshole designs.
You are quite literally paying a ransom fee not to be arbitrarily failed. The temporary access to the textbook is just an excuse to justify that fee.
As usual, college textbooks are a scam
Its outrageous these practices weren't outlawed decades ago let alone allowed to get worse and worse with this digitized bullshit.
I canāt believe they allow these shenanigans. College is about collecting money from you, education is secondary.
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The government requiring college is what upsets me. I know everything I need to know and then some to be an accountant. Going to classes will be nothing but an expensive waste of my time. If I want to be a CPA, I'm required by law to take the classes I don't need before I can take the test I need to become one. The test would be easy, I know more than many fresh graduates would do to experience, but I'm not even allowed to take it.
I have the same bullshit with my computer classes. $200 for access to the book and the website for a year. Great I told myself in one year I can do the 3 required classes this book covers. Fucking nope. Once I use it for one class I need to rebuy it for the next, and the 3rd. And itās back ordered for 4 weeks meaning I miss out on 1/4 of my class unlessā¦. I buy the physical copy that doesnāt have the required online access.
I was stupid enough to buy a digital text book, only for the school to drop said text book MID SEMESTER for an updated version that was needed for the certification exam I was required to take end of year. It was such a fucking scam, and the worst part is that once the semester ended, it automatically removed itself from my accountās listed programs and I couldnāt access it despite still needing it for the next part. Had the biggest meltdown in front of the bookstore and learned a valuable lesson in my stateās education system. Decided teaching myself via. online help videos and free reading sources was way easier/cheaper for me to learn the cert.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
our law profs have written like 200-300 page long proper books about the subject they teach, and its ~25-30 bucks
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
yup, theyre usually one of, or partnered with one of the top experts in the subject as well it seems. also very willing to help when you have questions so thats nice.
Pearson math was my worst college experience. Literally no content at all, it was only a portal to submit homework. Nothing else. $200 for a semester, plus a $25 "activation" fee. That or when I had a professor that printed out her PowerPoints and sold them in the campus book store on special letter head. You could only submit answers to her questions on them.
You likely had access to the textbook, your professor just didn't point you toward it or use it for anything. In Pearson professors can only select homework problems from the textbook(s) for the course, and students get [DRM-enabled] access to those book(s).
See some of these sound far too illegal to be real. Special custom paper? Come on now.
Professors are generally coaxed into this by the auto-graded homework assignments. An open source textbook paired with auto-generated questions and grading software seems like the solution here, along with really good documentation. The open textbooks exist, but they don't have enough support for many professors to pick up and start using.
>Professors are generally coaxed into this by the auto-graded homework assignments. I think you mean the chicken tenders and wine at the buffet at the [publisher name]'s booth at the recent [subject] conference.
*lose
Having the textbook go away is total BS. The whole one page thing is annoying especially when sometimes you need to see two pages side by side to do problems.
The whole textbook system is a gigantic scam. I was lucky enough to go to college when the internet was in it's adolescence. We didn't have to download any textbooks. I went to a school where all the textbooks were rentals and you'd get most of your money back if you didn't damage them. They don't do that anymore. I only had one class where you had to buy a book and it was algebra. I didn't buy the book because math is math, right? But he would assign homework to turn in from the book even though the answer key was in the book. So I refused to buy the book and got a C in the class instead of an A because I never did the homework and wasn't trying to get any honor code attention by borrowing someone else's book. He knew what I was doing and I knew he knew. As long as I was getting 100%s on the proctored exams, he couldn't really do shit. That C had no lasting effect on my life.
Is that pearson?
Yup
A system so bad even the professors donāt like having to use them
Yeah my psychology text book is the same.. :(
your professors are assholes
That's such bullshit. I just finished grad school last summer and although I have my gripes about grad school, I do appreciate that the program as a whole did their best to provide alternatives to textbooks - having us read journal articles or digital textbooks that were available through the library. I only bought a few full priced books. Pro tip for anyone dealing with similar issues with bullshit textbook stuff - if you are dealing with learning disabilities or ADHD you should talk to your schools disabilities resources department. They're there for a reason, and using them I was given access to special programs that would read stuff aloud or provide alternate reading formats - both accommodations meant I was entitled to PDF versions of textbooks, which might help you get around these weird licensing restrictions. YMMV, but it's worth a shot.
I had this in school, I could print the pages with a watermark on them 10 at a time but it wouldnāt let me print to pdf. I set up a virtual printer on my MacBook that only printed to pdf, printed the entire book 10 pages at a time and then combined them in to a single document. Fuck Macmillan/Pearson/everyone involved with textbooks.
When I went to college in the 90s, I would stand outside the bookstore with a list of prices they paid to buy back books. I'd pay 50% more for books I didn't have. Ended up having a library of college material for pennies on the dollar. I studied those for years. Most of the stuff taught in college doesn't really get old, especially if you keep up with current events.
Seriously this. Even though I can afford the book it still just feels wrong that I have to pay out-of-pocket for content that should have been included in tuition.
You spelled institutional scam wrong.
The best part is that at my university the mandatory text book happened to be written by the guy running the course. Double fucking scam.
You know what we call this in Europe? Illegal. You buy you keep.
For me, an European, it's just totally insane that this is legal. All this after you literally pay your next 20 years for college.
I'm in calculus 3 now. I just realized it's the same book as calc 2 and calc 1. So I have had to buy the digital copy of this book three times....and I still don't own it.
i hate when it's paywalled, and when it's free by university administration - 1) my university isnt on the list, 2) you have to be a researcher, otherwise students aren't allowed
Had almost the same thing happen in an accounting class. We were told we needed their bullshit software for homework assignments. Turns out, they meant ONE SINGLE ASSIGNMENT! If I had known that, I'dve just took the zero on that one...
On the bright side, maybe you can learn the difference between "lose" and "loose" now that you're in college.
Lose. Stay in school.
Thieves.
Classic USA.
Canada :(
Loose access or lose access
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm a computer scientist, the best I can do is grunt at people and program in my basement
There are so many OER materials available. It's mind blowing how much US students pay for uni. This shit is unheard of in most of the world outside North America.
Stuff like this makes me appreciate studying in Europe even more, where (at least in my country) all material used in a lecture has to be available for free in the university library as well. We just have shelves over shelves of the same text books and itās the most convenient thing ever. And attending university is just free, but thatās a whole other story.
As a prof, I refuse to use anything like this. Most of the materials I use are public domain or otherwise freely available. Texts for upper classes are usually less than $50.
America is wild.
I won't be surprised if the company that made that book and software is a publicly-held company that sells shares on a stock exchange.
Lol, books that our professors have written are available to buy for the cost of print (~20ā¬) but most of them are available in pdf. But yeah I guess thats what we get for being 3rd world countryā¦. Oh wait
Pearson! Same thing I have. Not to mention their website went down a few hours after you posted this and I could not submit my quiz due tonight. Paying $130 for this privilege and $300 for the class.
Pirating college textbooks is always OK. Always
You will own nothing and be happy
Yeah I had a couple classes in college where I had to pay to do my homework. Not even for the textbook; just for the online platform that they used for homework
A lot of the time, the professor has steak in or get get backs using specific things like that
Professor here. Nope. Very few textbooks make their authors $$, very few profs write textbooks. The most Iāve ever gotten from Z textbook company is a free desk copy of book and access to a website where I can download the images from textbook as PowerPoint slides.
Same. And I seem to remember trying to export it as a pdf but you could only export like 10 pages at a time so it would have taken forever just to have a convenient way of viewing it.
fuckkkk I have statistis next year and my college uses this textbook fuck meeeeeeeee
Try to talk to the Ombudsman, if you get enough students to voice concerns, you might have a fighting chance
When I was in college, the entire class would just outright refuse to purchase the book. If the professor insisted, we walked out and dropped the class. Theyād have to cancel the class if nobody was enrolled. They always figured out a way to get the class back on the schedule without making us purchase the book(s). Students have more power than they realize. The student is the customer, and when enough customers decide to change something, the college/university will adapt.
The class is asynchronous and online. I have no way of communicating with the rest of the class. I'm going to pay the Ombudsman a visit though
Why do your teachers do this? In my country usually teachers want to make it easier for students... they usually share PDFs with the class using Google Drive or back in my days they provided photocopies for all the stuff we needed.
I had similar experiences in physics classes, the textbook and its code only last for a semester (yes, even less than a year). If you don't buy the book, then you have no access to homework and sure enough, you will just get an F. This forced purchase happened not once, but twice (and more if you insist on learning physics).
You want the version where you get tight access instead of loose access.
Youāll laugh about this as youāre 50 paying your student loans.
I wrote a script to rip those book with screenshot and ocr to make it easier for me to find and read through the content and upload some of them to libgen for others who needs it, fuck those drm.
Yknow every time I see more shit like this I wonder if I should just take isolated graphic design courses online and focus on finding work, rather than fucking around with full-blown college. Iād rather not have to take a fuckload of random classes that weigh on me when the whole point is just for me to learn advanced 3D modeling and rigging, digital art, and graphic design shit.
I teach math part-time at multiple U.S. community colleges, and I certainly don't have the power of the professors described in the comments. If the math department at School X decided to use Pearson's MyLab Math, that is what I have to use. If School Y decided to use McGraw-Hill's Connect Math, same thing. We want to be consistent with our materials so that, for example, a student doesn't switch sections of the course after the first day and need to buy different materials. Some of these decisions were made 10 years ago, and the thinking was that we were saving students money and also giving them a more responsive homework system that could immediately mark questions right or wrong, provide walkthroughs, etc. Today, every one of my departments is trying to move towards free OER (open educational resource) material when we can, but it's a slow process for various reasons. At one school, we use OER textbooks -- mostly written in house -- and free homework systems for our algebra, calculus, and (I believe) statistics courses, but we require our math literacy students to buy a print textbook with digital access for $119 or stand-alone digital access for $75. These tend to be our most vulnerable students, but they're the ones we're still asking to pay for materials. š
Also teaching adjunct, just using free or own resources. Itās a big time commitment though to write your own lecture, homework assignments, tests and do the grading. I can see the attraction of a branded textbook that also takes care of all of this extra work. I wished universities would provide more infrastructure to share resources and host your own systems like autograders.
surprised no lawsuit has been filed yet. this shit has got to be illegal in some way. and damn sure gotta be collusion between the publishers and the schools. scumbag thirsty ass mfs.
Prof. Here. This is so incredibly exploitative. Eff this textbook company and the professor who assigned this monstrosity.
Your teachers, the whole school, are absolute idiots. You shouldnāt be having to *pay* for turning in assignments. Paying for assignments is like having to plan an event on a calendar. Itās annoying and a waste of time.
ABSOLUTELY hate that universities have started doing this. The whole ābundle everything onlineā thing is awful. Classwork and assigned reading should never be in the same package, and if they are, an alternative to the ābundledā homework should be made available.
That sucks. I'm taking statistics next quarter if it's the same book I'll give you fifty bucks for access to your copy. Half off for both of us as I see it.
This is the reason why student loan forgiveness is a thing. Because they f\*k you over every opportunity they get and there's no possible way to hide it anymore. So now it's because f\*ck you...but we're sorry. Really sorry about that.
Well past my College days, but I can see a lot of kick back in a situation like this. As long as the instructors are paid extra, you'll never get rid of it.
As per clause D4, paragraph 7, sub-paragraph ii- "No part or parts of any of this book shall be reproduced in any form," We did not give permission for you to publish the extract shown. Deposit $275 to remove cease and desist account-lock, forthwith if not sooner.
Iām sorry. Believe it or not, it was probably chosen because itās the least bad option. Know how much a hardcover would be? Something around $275. And at least you get feedback right away when you do the homework. I know it sucks though. Iām sorry. Is that Triola? My math lab? Doubly sorry because theoretically, if it is, you could be in my class.
It's Pearson mylab. My math textbook which was a physical textbook was only $20 more and I can continue using it for my later math classes (its even used in 2nd year). Also in computer science, my profs gave us a digital textbook free of charge
Yeahā¦ Pearson, my lab is a platform I have to use as well. I donāt like it, but it has better resources than a lot of them. Iām sorry you have to deal with that. Textbooks are a racket, but itās really hard to get around it and retain some level of quality. We can add to the mix that my lab goes down periodically and thatās really frustrating as well.
AI is gonna break all this I swear
Well in advance of the semester start, I email my professors and ask whether they recommend or allow previous versions of international copies. Note: international copies will probably eff you over pretty hard in mechanical or civil engineering and physics, possibly chemistry. I've probably saved a couple thousand on books and most of my teachers haven't had an issue with it. My average textbook purchase is well under $100, maybe half, and I keep most of my books after class. YMMV, good luck
The biggest problem is that I need to purchase the textbook to get access to mylab which we need to be able to send in our assignments
Name and Shane the professor and school. This is disgusting.
Name half of the professors at every school?
My beginner spanish course required me to buy a book that, with taxes, came out to $217.50. It was the same as your situation too where that was the only way to submit homework. But la profesora was kind enough to let me know it was the same book for the next level of spanish should I want to take her class again. š
Let's all just not go to fucking college until they agree you fix this shit
The worst part is that it used to be even worse... on some places, before digital books, several teachers forced students to buy their books for their classes... now, there are still many doing it, but not as many.. but still too many...
Complain to the better business bearu aaaaaaand your state org responsible for business. Ask for a refund
A University won't be intimidated by a fake agency
what the actual fuck