[ryderm]

I'm about to graduate from a US college, and I've never paid for a text book. Very few classes use them for more than supplementary reading or for homework problems. With a combination of learning things online, recorded lectures, finding PDFs of them online, borrowing from a friend, and checking them out from the library, it's been easy to not buy them. I don't think I've actually done either of the last two, which brings up the question: are they even needed? Personally, I think they are largely useless with the wealth of information that is available online.

[aet]

Prices of text books go up when people rip off the authors, editors and publishers by downloading PDFs.

[kchoudhu]

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the authors, editors and publishers brought this upon themselves?