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Living Room / Re: Pirating abandoned content?
« Last post by app103 on May 16, 2008, 11:19 AM »A lot of poor starving developers educated themselves with free legal ebooks, coding and compiling with dev-c++ (or Delphi 6 Personal 
), on an old hunk of junk computer.
If you are going the self education route, there are plenty of free resources on the internet that are perfectly legal. Finding them is the issue, sometimes. It's why I spend time searching and digging for stuff, so those that need it can find it much easier. There is a lot of good stuff out there that needs someone to hang a big neon sign over it.
This would be a perfect example of something expensive in print that is free & legal in electronic form:
Handbook of Virtual Humans: VRlab in Switzerland was a major contributor to the work and you can read the book, free & legal, on their site, and it is enhanced with videos. Or you can buy the print version at amazon.com for $190.00 new or $89.99 used, and you don't get any videos.
That is quite a lot of money that could be saved by a starving student that might be required to read it for a course or someone that is trying to self educate themselves in order to have a chance of making a better life for their family. But they wouldn't know they could save that money and have better than print (or better than a pirated version of the print edition), if they can't find it or don't know it exists.
Personally, I think if you are a student and not going the self education route, that your books should be included in that high tuition you are paying and should be distributed to all students taking the course, in class, rather than them making you go on a wild hunt for the books at a price you can afford and getting them by a certain date.
Remember how they did things when you were a kid? They passed out textbooks in the beginning of the year and collected them at the end of the year. You didn't have to pay for the book unless you damaged it.
Schools can get the books cheaper than you. They get them at wholesale cost, not retail. And they could probably get a volume discount by buying so many. Even if they added it to the cost of your tuition, the amount would still be much smaller, if they give you the books at cost instead of trying to make a profit on them.
A few months ago I heard about a university professor, at GMU in Washington DC, that required students to purchase a textbook from him, that he wrote. He charged students a very high price for it, wouldn't allow them to buy it used, and the book included a label with the student's name and a serial number (how is that for anti-piracy!). If you didn't purchase the book, you could not pass the course. It was required! You couldn't even sell this book when you were done with it, because every student that took his course was in the same position that you were and couldn't buy it used.
It is quite possible that this teacher was making more off his book, by taking advantage of his students, than he was from teaching the course. People like that should die in an avalanche of used textbooks.
), on an old hunk of junk computer.If you are going the self education route, there are plenty of free resources on the internet that are perfectly legal. Finding them is the issue, sometimes. It's why I spend time searching and digging for stuff, so those that need it can find it much easier. There is a lot of good stuff out there that needs someone to hang a big neon sign over it.
This would be a perfect example of something expensive in print that is free & legal in electronic form:
Handbook of Virtual Humans: VRlab in Switzerland was a major contributor to the work and you can read the book, free & legal, on their site, and it is enhanced with videos. Or you can buy the print version at amazon.com for $190.00 new or $89.99 used, and you don't get any videos.
That is quite a lot of money that could be saved by a starving student that might be required to read it for a course or someone that is trying to self educate themselves in order to have a chance of making a better life for their family. But they wouldn't know they could save that money and have better than print (or better than a pirated version of the print edition), if they can't find it or don't know it exists.
Personally, I think if you are a student and not going the self education route, that your books should be included in that high tuition you are paying and should be distributed to all students taking the course, in class, rather than them making you go on a wild hunt for the books at a price you can afford and getting them by a certain date.
Remember how they did things when you were a kid? They passed out textbooks in the beginning of the year and collected them at the end of the year. You didn't have to pay for the book unless you damaged it.
Schools can get the books cheaper than you. They get them at wholesale cost, not retail. And they could probably get a volume discount by buying so many. Even if they added it to the cost of your tuition, the amount would still be much smaller, if they give you the books at cost instead of trying to make a profit on them.
A few months ago I heard about a university professor, at GMU in Washington DC, that required students to purchase a textbook from him, that he wrote. He charged students a very high price for it, wouldn't allow them to buy it used, and the book included a label with the student's name and a serial number (how is that for anti-piracy!). If you didn't purchase the book, you could not pass the course. It was required! You couldn't even sell this book when you were done with it, because every student that took his course was in the same position that you were and couldn't buy it used.
It is quite possible that this teacher was making more off his book, by taking advantage of his students, than he was from teaching the course. People like that should die in an avalanche of used textbooks.
)
