[steele]

Buying used global editions from the international students is the move for undergrads at big schools. Hardcover binding and color print were not missed and definitely not worth 10-20x more. Even published lecturers would ask students to fetch a "course pack" compilation of sloppy photocopied excerpts for purchase by on-campus print operations. Somehow this wasn't piracy. It is no secret that publishers and booksellers have an incestuous relationship with education institutions and aggressively extract pounds of loan debt flesh from the student body.

[bentley]

Wiley actually tried to abuse copyright law to prohibit import and sale of international textbooks. They fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, and (thankfully) lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....

[asdff]

Nah, better to just pirate them and save your back.

[steele]

Piracy?! What do I look like, an AI CEbro pillaging intellectual property for monopolistic commercial advantage without material consequence?!

For a time, course packs were the piracy of convenience because a PDFs with well-meaning but unreliable OCR were loaded with images (charting etc) resulting in large, difficult to navigate files even at the most eye watering, illegible compression.