Oh, you bought a used version of our $120 book for only $30 on Amazon? Great!

My rule of thumb is:

Avoid buying the book (if possible) if it's for some transitory bullshit e.g. programming languages where it changes significatly between versions (java 6 to 7 for example) or whatever

Buy the book if it's got concepts/theory that doesn't change significantly over time (maths, stats, etc), at least for a basic level, since these will probably always have a part in anyone's personal library as reference works.

kys you worthless faggot

>angry americans
calm down, you may get a stroke

over this last year I altogether stopped buying the textbooks except for ones I actually needed for homework problems or things like that and it made almost no difference, I missed maybe a total of 5 test questions in each class that were purposely cherry picked from the reading material
it's a total scam

I'm wondering, are all europeans such insufferable cunts or is it just on the internet?

Protip: your university pays your professor jackshit

He shouldn't even be teaching you. But out love and respect for the institution, he only charges you 120 dollars per semester (and you get a fucking dope book you ungrateful bastard)

go to bed teach

Youre a boot-licking bitch-boy.

just ask the guy next to you in class if he as a code and buy it for like $10

problem solved

>Protip: your university pays your professor jackshit
lel Average associate professor salary is $140,000 at my school. Even still, that's a salary we pay as part of our tuition. He has no business doing this under-the-table bullshit to get more money out of us.

Professor should get a job in the real world then.

These codes usually give you access to an online website where you do / turn in homework / quizzes / etc. The website is associated with your professor, and your code becomes linked to your name / student ID.

give me his name and i'll hack his shit up

do it op DO IT

p.s.: i hope you are not stupid enough to give me his name, i would just email him this thread

>insufferable
That is America, which interferes with everyone. You pigs are a threat to world peace.

this my friend

>Actually living in third world country where you have to pay for your books
Any university in any non shit country will give you access to its library including pdfs and wont require you to buy shit.

From thr scale 0 - 10 hoe scientific is this thread? Kys

what a fucking scam lmao

>get scammed
>whine about it instead of shooting your professor and burning down the university book store

baka

SHART

>How is this anyway ethical?
It's not. College is a business.

How scientific are your words "thr" and hoe"

i always imagine the prof stroking his huge cock as his royalties appear on his bank rostatement

(((Land of the free)))

>American universities are the best in the world

When will this meme end, I'm sick of hearing about this retarded textbook shit

>Freedom means other people aren't allowed to sell books at high prices

The americans who actually deserved to go had scholarships.

:)))

>yes goyim you are free now have a $200k student loan for a degree have another 30 year loan for a house yes you can buy a shiny new car too with a loan and don't forget to get a new iPhone 7™ by financing it
"""""""freedom"""""""""

jew detected

>bawww I need big daddy government to tell people not to sell me things

Maybe you should just not go to school if it isn't cost effective for you.

This

>you're a jew if you *aren't* a marxist

Fuck off socialist kike.

>yes goyim, choose between $200k debt for a degree or working minimum wage at Walmart your entire life, remember you have a choice™
When will the libretardian meme die

If the only way you can think of to make money without a bachelor's degree us working at walmart then you deserve to work at walmart.

>falling for the for profit education meme

enjoy that 200k debt and job applications that go straight into the trash

donate 100 to sanders maybe he'll save you

LMAO

How is this shit even legal? Isn't this a blatant conflict of interest? It would be like my doctor telling me to buy some OTC drugs that he has equity in.

>conflict of interest

College is a product. You don't have to buy it if you don't want to. Professors selling their own books as a requirement for their course isn't any different than movie theaters only allowing you to bring in food from their snack store. Stop being a socialist weasel.

>movie theaters only allowing you to bring in food from their snack store.
This is unethical as well and it's also the reason movie theaters are going out of business.

>unethical

If you don't like it don't pay them for their products or services. It's that simple. If people are paying them then ought to be allowed to take their money.

>not wanting professors to abuse their position as a way to get you to buy their shitty book means you're a socialist

legitimate question is it hard to function day to day in your life considering you're a massive retard?

My English teacher required only Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, the previous third edition. I had a copy on my shelf.

Another professor required a textbook that he had written, but refunded his students his royalty on it.

Lol, I haven't bought a single textbook during my BSc. Oh, maybe only one, which was control theory, but it turned out to be outdated shit (written by the professor ofc).

>abuse

Them deciding to sell a product doesn't abuse shit. You're not entitled to their class you whiny millenial bernie-fag.

Don't about textbook prices, but monographs from American publishers tend to be way, way cheaper than European ones.

You can buy a book from Harvard or MIT for $30, meanwhile at Brill and de Gruyter prices start at €90 and it's not unusual to pay $300 for a collection of studies.

Guess what? Doctors do that shit too!

>tfw free education
>tfw uni library gives you pdfs of any book you might need
>can also print that pdf for cheap if you like having a hard copy
feels good man, even if everything else in our country is shit

I go to a public university.

Some teachers seem to be getting frustrated about this. Back when I was taking gen physics my teacher had this list of books that were technically out of date and cheaper, but were just as good as the new editions.

It's the shitty humanities that drive me up a wall. I've actually gone back and referenced my calc book, but never some anthropology shit.

That's how you know you're dealing with a Jew

>College is a business
speak for yourself idiot. not all of us are itt tech graduates like you.

I guess you're an American. It must suck living in a country where getting fucked in the ass is daily routine because everything including basic social infrastructure is a business with no noteworthy regulation whatsoever.

Brazilbois ?

>not understanding basic economics on a /sci board
>getting mad about the truth

>living in a communist country where you think everything is "free" because you actually pay 50% of your income in taxes and you have zero economic freedoms

>two professors did this
>both books were around $30
>money is only used to pay for publishing
Thank God. This could have been so much worse

I don't have a problem if it is on a very niche subject, but making a brand new undergrad textbook that regurgitates the same crap as other textbooks should be prohibited. Sorry Professor Stein, I don't think you are going to be doing anything revolutionary in Physics 101.

>and you have zero economic freedoms
>having to go $100k into debt for something as basic as a college education is considered "economic freedom"

why are ameriblubbers such subhuman proud debt slaves to their Jewish masters?

>had a professor write his own book for class
>Expensive, like $180 at the time
>Full of grammar and math errors
>Makes us also buy the $30 supplement with the corrections in it.

I think that is when I just started downloading pdfs for everything.

It's not legal in most countries, I don't know what user is talking about. But what profs who know each other will do is agree to assign each others books, which amounts to the same thing and it's a bit less obvious.

>How is this shit even legal?

Only legal in America.

>le scholarship meme

You wouldn't have an economy if only people with scholarships graduated.

I'm not sure living in a country full of brainlets is any better

What kind of university uses online homework instead of paper? Never heard of this but it sounds like some CC bullshit.

being brainwashed since young age. having social healthcare and not being 200 000$ in debt after college is a bad thing because their jewish overlords tell them so and they will defend it cause they are cucks

you can enter a library for free (zero dollars) (($0))

I've never had to go out and buy a book for any of my classes. Is this the norm in America?

Wtf is with all of these people bitching about 150 dollar textbooks? That's cheap. I've had some that were double that.

Nope
Bio?

>run for a position in the student union
>promise to create a shared online resource of textbooks so that we could dl them as pdfs
>scan the pages in with various students' margin notes and compile uber-textbooks
>someone can scan in page 735 or whatever with their notes and the best pages are complied over the years
>all exercises online for free
>university: "muh illegal to scan textbooks"
>then arrange e-books with the publisher?
>professors: "b-but you need to by the XMMMMCCCXLVI edition of my textbook!!1 every year I put in new goodies, like a new preface!"
>most pages will stay the same and the uber-book evolves over time
>"shut it down"
>students tired of profs exploiting them and I get some momentum
>some LGBBQJFMSUF+ candidate runs
>I get smeared anonymously
>sent emails like "rapist loser kill yourself scum" etc
>report it
>nothing
>laugh it off
>she wins because she can mobilize the hyper-political SJWs
>rather than holding the university to account, expanding the library, buying more textbooks and scho on, she(?) decided to spend the little money we had on "refugees welcome"/BLM style protests
>she wants the university to cover the cost of study and accommodation for """Syrian""" refugees that want to study
>even when we are understaffed and underfunded
>...
>I stayed out of student politics after that

I'm not /pol/, it's simply amusing to me how that was a microcosm of the west atm. Even if my ideas were impractical or a bit farfetched, I hoped that some other students and staff would at least want to solve some of these problems that have been dogging students for YEARS. Guess I was wrong. Student politics is insanity, and a waste of time if you want to actually improve efficiency and happiness.

what are libraries? Since the european universities don't scam their students with "exercises that require an online code from my newest book!" you can just get a book from the library and enjoy your free university experience

Bio, yeah, and pic related. Also, got to love my school's "custom edition" of fucking Stewart's calculus which is twice as expensive as the normal edition, and from what I can tell, the only difference is that it's actually missing sections.

DDOS the servers used for the online homework?

If it's Cengage, they fucking DDoS themselves.

Seriously. Those servers were down for the last week of my last term, due to "high traffic".

Because it was fucking finals week, when everything was due.

Why not just acquire the books through totally legal means.

sounds like typical liberal harassment. They're ALWAYS on the wrong side of every issue.

False. I had to purchase a book with activation code for online exercises that were required to pass a course. That was in the Netherlands.

Extortion apologist

I believe the only lecturers who do this are hacks with squalid careers at teaching universities who know that they will never conduct relevent research again (or perhaps not publish at all) so the only thing they have to do is squeeze as much money out of students by making their own book the textbook for the course and forcing students to buy it each year.

>obtaining a debt
>paying 100k for college
Hearty kek

>100 students * $120 textbook = $12,000 semester
>3 semesters per year
>$36k

a boo hoo

close but no, niggertina
we had an exchange student from brazil (she was hot as fuck mang) and she had a really hard time because apparently uni is easier over there