1y ago

“Most notorious” illegal shadow library (LibGen) sued by textbook publishers

arstechnica.com “Most notorious” illegal shadow library sued by textbook publishers [Updated]

Previous efforts to unmask the people behind Libgen have failed.

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

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9 comments

I would feel more sympathy if textbooks weren't hundreds of dollars and didn't have new revisions coming out every year meaning you can't use older revisions and can't sell them for shit after you are done with them.
- "Remember, you have to have the new 8th edition. Only one paragraph was changed, but the pagination is different, and you won't be able to keep organized if you have an older edition" - A University Professor on the first day of class who had the class use a book he wrote.
  
  Literally how it always was. And the new version was always like 300 dollars and you needed to buy the book for every class. Yea, hard to feel much sympathy at all for the publishers. And let's not forget the classes like that where you NEEDED the book but then you used it twice throughout the semester. I've been out of school the better part of a decade and it STILL makes my blood boil remembering it.
  
  That's how it was when I went through 30 years ago. When my kid was going it was all like the other poster said. Used books could be free, but you still had to buy the full price textbook code to do the work for the class. Complete scam.
- The current scam is expensive access to an online system for homework that is only sold with the textbook.
  
  Jesus. Anything to milk the students for as much money as possible while putting in as little as they possibly can.
- I wouldn't. College is already prohibitively expensive as-is. You're telling me I have to pay all this money for tuition, and you're not even going to provide me with the materials I need?

9 comments