Hacker News Reader

Comment by truth_ | Hacker News Reader

That's an unethical practice employed by some companies. Although in many cases it can be circumvented by buying old textbooks anyway.

I am glad that many CS authors nowadays make textbooks available for free. And companies like O'Reilly, Packt, and Manning provide DRM free copies.

View on HN

When I tried using a previous edition, the page numbers and most of the exercises didn't line up. "Thursday's test will be on pp 144-172 inclusive, and get to know exercise 5.17." It put me at a surprisingly big disadvantage.

Pretty sure the publishers anticipated this.

That's often the only thing that actually substantially changes between editions. Shuffle the exercise numbers and change the font and spacing and voila, brand new edition completely incompatible with older versions!

If that’s true, can’t there be some consumer class-action applied?

Class actions, like any lawsuit, require a law to be broken.

If the teachers are helpful, this would not be an issue. In most places I went to, teachers understood, and some peer always helped people with older textbooks. For problem set additions or extra chapters or pages, we used to photocopy those pages before high-res cameras became a norm in mobile phones.

What school was this? I would never send myself or a child to a school that exploited us like that.

also many professor make wink-and-nod that student may simply "find pdf copy" from internet. good ones are not desiring for to make students pay large moneys.

I got a bit pissed that this for one course. Wasn't the professor's fault, but rather the school.

(in 2011) University tells incoming students they must check the book list for their course and get books before classes start. Books are expensive.

First day of class - professor gives everyone a PDF of the physics book I just spend $200 on. Says, "the university requires that I list at least one book for the course and they can't communicate with the students beforehand.

Never bought books before the first day of class again.

I've seen similar things, with the reasoning being less "the university requires the professor to list at least one required text" (this one would be easy to sidestep: just require a cheap or free one and then use another) and more "the texts listed are required will be sold to students at a discount, so students can only profit from this... as long as they are in the know".

Bad ones on the other hand make you buy their badly photocopied, handwritten notes from the university copy center, where the receipt is itemized as:

Binding and printing: $1.50

Royalties to professor X: $$

I literally changed majors back in my school days over those shenanigans by the department head.

At least the university copy center is open about it vs taking the blame themselves for ridiculous printing fees.

I would expect better from Professor X though.

If you have an ACM Membership, you get access to tons of books too!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com