[dml2135]

Have you seen what books cost? Not textbooks, like those from Pearson or something, but regular books.

This guy is a philosophy professor, so if he is assigning a book every 1-2 weeks, in a 14-week semester, let’s say that’s like 8 books.

Buying 8 books for under $100 is cheap. It does sound like he takes care to craft an affordable syllabus.

Of course, if you are taking 5 classes a semester it’s gonna add up, but this is really not on the egregious end of things.

[cykros]

In fairness, as a philosophy major, I realized fairly early on that most of what we read was out of copyright. I suppose if he's assigning stuff that is ABOUT what some philosophers wrote, it makes sense, but forgive me if I prefer just saving money to read Aristotle from Project Gutenberg.

And sure, there is more contemporary philosophy, and it's great he's keeping the books affordable. But if it's anything early 20th century or prior, don't be so surprised people are going to read what's in the public domain instead.

[dml2135]

Haha what I remember in those cases was that the main value in having the assigned book was being able to same page during class discussions.

I mean, literally the same page — so if someone says “what did ya’ll think about this quote on p.156” I could actually get to it in time instead of scrambling to find the passage in whatever I printed out from Project Guttenberg.

For this reason my strategy to save book money was usually to get the assigned books from the library and camp out in front of the copy machine for an afternoon.

[mschnell]

We used to peruse the library back in the day.

[dml2135]

Ha I would spend a couple hours in front of the library copy machine at the start of the semester, and then take my stack to the store and get it bound myself.

[odo1242]

I considered this for one particularly hard to find book and it turned out it would have not cost much more to just buy the textbook compared to printing it lol

[dml2135]

Lol yea this mostly worked out for cases where just a few chapters were assigned.