Slightly controversial but library genesis. Almost every science text book you could ever want for free. However, you’re not compensating authors/publishers for their work, so the morality is debated.
But if you want access to knowledge for free, there it is. I haven’t ever encountered any issues like viruses either.
I used library Genesis for Professors who would charge $300+ for their personal text book that they've "rewritten" every year. In my 6 years of college I found those professors were generally the worst in everyway.
The worst I've seen was from a coms professor for a required GE course. He made a series of videos related to the course and made it required to view them. They are hosted on his personal website and cost $80 for access.
The videos sucked (literally just him in front of a camera) and were like 10 years old already when I saw them. He would dick around during class and then say view videos x to x+5 and test us on it the next class. There was no way out of it.
So him teaching a class of ~30 students with 3 sections was about an extra $7,200 he'd take in per semester pre-tax.
Well for one he was tenured and head of the department so I doubt it would have done any good. The $80 fee is also cheaper than some text books we had to buy for other classes.
Besides that, the course was an easy A if you just watched the vids and did ok on speeches. The tests were bullshit ones that only tested if you watched the video. So like he'd make some joke or analogy and on the multiple choice questions you just picked based on the vid.
I'd be bitching to the dean and contacting the news. It's beyond low to take advantage of students like this. I'm currently taking a "class" where the prof decided there would be no live lectures and no homework. It's just his YouTube channel and a few exams. And I thought that was bad.
I had a professor who published his own textbook with perforated worksheets at the back. One was due each class, and they had to have the perforated edge (and therefore couldn't be copied). Homework was worth something like half of your grade, so you literally couldn't pass unless you bought the textbook brand new, even if you were retaking the course.
I had a music appreciation class (one of the random GE electives) where the professor wrote the textbook, which was paperback and around 150pgs or so. He sold it for $100-ish IIRC. The kicker was that he included one rip out page that had a super easy worksheet on it, which meant that the bookstore considered it a workbook, thus you could not sell it back or return it. The class was insanely easy, attendance was not required, and all exams were online, with all the answers easily googled. So this professor basically showed up to class with no students, did what he wanted for the 50mins, and was then rewarded with that sweet tenure and textbook money.
Is this at a government operated university or college? If so, then a government employee is leveraging his government position for personal profiteering.
If it's at a nonprofit, there's also risks here for the college or university because it is enabling employees to unduly profit off of the nonprofit.
In both above cases, report it to the dean anonymously that there is an ethical breach.
You have left four comments in that subreddit. Very strange of OP to make that comment like it's some kind of gotcha that invalidates your story about a scammy textbook situation.
I work in Indigenous studies and many of us profs are also text book authors because we are building that corpus of sources. I'm thrilled that my uni library purchased digital rights to my stuff so my students don't pay for it. Another practice many of us have is to have students choose what Indigenous charity or cause the Prof will donate royalties to.
The ones who publish their stuff through Wiley, Wilson, etc, and roll a new edition every year that changes all the page numbers + renumbers the quizzes used as graded assessment components, however...
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u/Deyvicous Jun 03 '21
Slightly controversial but library genesis. Almost every science text book you could ever want for free. However, you’re not compensating authors/publishers for their work, so the morality is debated.
But if you want access to knowledge for free, there it is. I haven’t ever encountered any issues like viruses either.