Quote:
Originally Posted by wyndslash
i'm in the philippines. yes, textbooks are really expensive almost everywhere, i think. photocopying huge sections of books isn't an issue here. and there are photocopiers all over campus. the student council in my university has a "buy back" program, so if i need a whole text and they have it, i just buy it there and sell it back to them once the term is over. it's really more on the part of saving. i would love to own the colored texts; i think most students would, but the cost is staggering, and the really sore point with student textbooks is that they would churn out edition after edition every year, and the content is basically identical save for updated examples and reordering of chapters.
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in Asia, generally piracy is a big problem. Vietnam signed the Bern Convention in 2004, but things've always been the same - like nothing happened. I agree that paper book's cost is terrible and beyond imagination: take my living costs for instance. In a month, I put $70 in food, $100 in accommodation and $50 in other miscellaneous things - books cost about $20 of this. Before I own an ereader, I used to buy paper books, which were costly with the price range varied from $5 to $10. See? I could only buy 4 books at top. That's why people, especially students, love to buy illegal copies and fake books - you can't find new works in 2ndhand bookstores. How can a student afford his expensive university books with $20?
Now I own an ereader and thanks to it, don't have to buy such many books as I used to. But books for university don't exist in any format of file to be found, so I have to get paper books. But I digged through several bookstores and still couldn't find them --> the result is that I HAVE TO use those illegal photocopy. That's the problem.
