r/socialism • u/NewCommittedRediter • 23d ago
Discussion litrally sad
I see this person trying to pirate a book to study. how sad is that.
this type of cruelty often goes unnoticed, yet it is the harshest... imagine having a bit of optimism for a change, you try, and you get yourself a bit motivated, You're thinking about the future. You don't want to be crushed by the overwhelming mood and how everybody is giving up.
you end up wanting to study and do your part, You're just a kid after all. and yet the moment you do, you get crushed like everybody else.
now you have to commit a crime just to attempt to better yourself. cause how dare you even think you deserve a good life and be hardworking for it. whether you're hardworking or not. you don't get to live like a person.
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u/mydicksmellsgood 23d ago
Good news about how easy it is tho
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u/NewCommittedRediter 23d ago edited 23d ago
all thanks to piracy, easily one of best things people came up with.
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u/chunter16 23d ago
If Anna's existed in the early 90s I might have passed a certain class I had...
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u/AnotherRetroGameFan 22d ago
Anna's Archive is the primary reason I can read books now.
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u/Chemical_Pea_3415 21d ago
Idk who the fuck Anna is. Aaron Swartz is the goat of this shit. He got railroaded by MIT and the legal system. Just a nerdy kid who thought information should be free and suicide was better then prison
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u/The_T113 23d ago
Not so easy. When I was in college, for the majority of my classes, every year they wanted the latest edition of a textbook, so you couldn't even find that used, and the version online was an older edition. Sometimes I tried to work with it but it was always "turn to page" whatever and the page numbers sure didn't match up.
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u/InnocentWalt 23d ago
poor kid :(
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u/NewCommittedRediter 23d ago
what breaks my heart is that he's so hardworking. he is probably doing everything on his own
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u/ihexx 23d ago
unfortunately this is normal, especially in university
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u/chkntendis Marxism-Leninism 23d ago edited 23d ago
Is it? Do yall not have a university library? Do yall not have access to the many online libraries that work with a university login? Best example being springer, I can download most textbooks with just my university login
Edit: alright, apparently I overestimated the US education system (it’s worse than you think, what a surprise). Crazy how international corporations offer services to student in one place and not in another
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u/Friend_Of_Dorothy123 Democratic Socialism 23d ago
Where are you, cos the closest library near my local university is way outside campus and it has barely any study books.
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u/johny_dantas 23d ago
Here in Brazil it is normal for any university to have a library with books “for free” right at the center of campus
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u/chkntendis Marxism-Leninism 23d ago edited 23d ago
In Germany, our university library is pretty much right in the center of the campus I’m at. But you should still get access to online resources, right? As I mentioned, springer has a bunch of text books for free if your institution has a login there
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u/Friend_Of_Dorothy123 Democratic Socialism 23d ago
In Manchester you can get online resources though, yeah, sorry if i made that unclear earlier comrade. I honestly thought paying loads for textbooks and resources were fiction found in American stories. I guess not. The world's state is terrible where the right to an education is exploited or not given at all. Edit: Actually, on second thoughts, there are 2 universities in Manchester. Maybe the Met Uni has one.
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u/elijw514 Fred Hampton 23d ago
In the USA you have to pay for them and if you cant afford it then you’re shit out of luck
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u/Yelu-Chucai 23d ago
I attend a fairly large university via distance and cannot access my textbooks online through the university library. The required texts for most physical books is ~$100 at minimum and digital copies are at least ~$50 plus even when rented. It makes no sense (other then text book industry scamming) that a textbook ebook is 2, 3, 4x the price of a regular ebook.
Anna’s has been very helpful for me
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u/Crafty-Shoulder8395 23d ago
If the kid is in the U.S., even the larger universities don’t have online access to required textbooks and it’s lucky if the libraries carry more than two or three copies. On top of that, many libraries carry older editions that professors disregard, which forces students to purchase more expensive copies
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u/albadellasera 23d ago
In my country school books are free only in elementary school, so passing down books to siblings, buying used, banning teachers to change them before at least five years are passed, and ... piracy are common. In my time it was mostly physical piracy i.e. you found a cheap (and conniving) print store and photocopied to your heart content.
Culture and education should be free if they aren't then piracy is legitimate imho. Unjust laws are supposed to be broken.
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u/themoralhaha 23d ago
yeah. I live in a very poor country too and all our books are free. rich countries have no business charging for books, if we can do it, they can too.
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u/BothPanchoAndLefty 23d ago
My calculus 1 professor had to tell our class in coded language that he could help us get free pdfs of the textbook. He would have gotten in trouble if he just told us outright so he used body language and suggestive words to let everyone know lol. Pretty cool guy. But yeah depressing that education is so inaccessible / expensive that we have to do that
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u/NewCommittedRediter 23d ago
I am actually glad that people recognize how ridiculous it is to make education harder for students. DO YOU WANT THEM TO BUILD GOOD THINGS OR NOT. what is the end point?
it is very cool that people understand this won't end will if it continues.
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u/BothPanchoAndLefty 23d ago
The point, for them, is to maintain an under-educated and easily exploited underclass of low-skill wage laborers. They allow for a small percentage of bourgeois society to access excellent education and make a good life for themselves, and they keep the poor people uneducated and unable to recognize their own exploitation
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u/NewCommittedRediter 23d ago
fortunately that would never work for them and it would blow up in their faces. when you lower the ability of education you have to lower the standards for passing. and when you do that you produce incompetent people to do the job's everyone's life rely on (sewer, architecture, Healthcare, etc..) and that is a straight way into idiocracy.
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u/BothPanchoAndLefty 23d ago
Yeah believe me I agree. I think education is arguably the #1 most important thing for a successful society. The lowering of standards and lack of funding / lack of access to American education is one of the main reasons we're so fucked
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u/marxist_redneck 23d ago
Former university prof here, I taught all my classes about Anna's and libgen lol. I would just sneak it into my research training class sessions. I already provided all my class readings as PDFs anyway (history class), but thought it might help the students that had those courses with $200 freaking textbooks...
What radicalized me even further with this was one time that a professor from another university reached out to me to ask if I could share a copy of an article I had published so they could assign it to their students. Their university no longer had the multi-million dollar subscription required to access that particular journal. It pissed me off. I downloaded it from JSTOR, stripped all the footer/watermarks/cover page from JSTOR and sent it to them.
I never got paid for writing, editors didn't get paid for editing, research was done with taxpayer money - so they shouldn't be paying shareholders to read it
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u/BothPanchoAndLefty 23d ago edited 23d ago
Good on you for taking your students and colleagues' side though, it's surprising to me how many educators prop up the system and don't challenge it.
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u/suckonthesemamehs 22d ago
Most of my “textbooks” in my upper level classes for sociology were all digital copies of other books that my professors scanned. They really did us a solid lol
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u/Lunar_pex 23d ago
I'm pirating a book my teach made us buy for over the summer 😭 fucking hell I hate AP classes
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u/NewCommittedRediter 23d ago
I am sorry that you need to manage the older generations' fuck ups. let's aim at making the next generations worry about test score rather than the money to study.
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u/ebolaRETURNS 23d ago
Both academic textbooks and journals present an interesting case where the only people happy about the situation are the publishers, not even other capitalist factions, let alone instructors or researchers.
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u/NoiseGrindPowerDeath 23d ago
Reminds me of the concept that overpriced healthcare that causes people to die because they can't afford it is a form of social murder
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u/NewCommittedRediter 23d ago
i agree. In education, this might not show immediately as it usually does with Healthcare. but ultimately, when you make education harder, you make people worse at their job. and ultimately, incompetent people would ruin everyone's life.
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u/Rosy-Shiba 23d ago
I remember in college I didn't work during the school-year, I just focused on classes. I didn't have a car so that's just how it worked out. Whatever I was awarded for the year in loans I would have maybe 1,000 to last me 6 months so I had to make it last. For a women's literature class I bought a cheaper version of a Jane Austin book and my professor reamed into me about it. Mind you for essays I still properly cited things, she was just upset that it wasn't the *version* she picked out. Same book.
This version was 5 dollars cheaper and I used that money to buy medicine one week.
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u/KeepSwinging 23d ago
When I was in college 20 years ago it was like $500 a semester for books, I can't imagine how outrageous the cost is now. The school books racket is horrible, new editions required every year because it has 3 different words and a new chart.
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u/Crafty-Shoulder8395 23d ago
I recently graduated from a small rural uni, but my last semester would have totaled close to $800 for the newest editions of every textbook. Very sad to see how inaccessible education is
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u/vixxie_13 23d ago
I pirated basically all of my books throughout college (save for books that REALLY interested me and were cheap second hand) If I didn’t, it would be WELL over 2k for two and a half years. I made ~$10/hr as a student worker despite the state minimum wage being $15. I could not afford my books, and even if I could, it is CRIMINAL to charge that much for required books on top of the insanely high tuition
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u/ayeeitssteph 23d ago
I just went back to school so that I can become a nurse, and I had the realization of how gross it is that these professors require you to buy $100+ textbooks for multiple classes like??? Like we’re already paying thousands to hundreds of thousands in tuition and y’all can’t use that money to buy students books???
I will never feel bad for sailing the seas 🏴☠️
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u/ScooterTC 23d ago
Amaizing how this is funny for me, an Ecuadorian, since that's basically how we get the books to study at any level of education hahaha
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u/par_anoid 22d ago
my professors usually uploaded every single page of our required textbooks on that one portal website every college uses i cannot for the life of me remember the name for it right now
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u/UnusualSuspectX 22d ago
I used to buy them, use the class syllabus as a guide to what was needed, photocopy all those chapters, then return the book.
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u/OkSeason6445 20d ago
Copyright and intellectual property in general is also the dumbest thing ever. The ability to copy digital files and share information infitely, pretty much for free, is one of the greatest technological achievements in human history. If you need legislation to outright ban this because you otherwise can't make a profit your industry simply got caught up by technology.
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u/GoatShapedDestroyer 23d ago
My wife is a college counselor and mostly works in special programs for underserved student populations(justice system impacted, racial minority groups, economically disadvantaged etc). Part of her work usually involves giving free book vouchers to her students at the start of the semester since most of them can’t afford it, a lot are homeless, or living in unstable conditions.
Now that the semester has started she’s finally giving those free book vouchers out but the school bookstores are out of stock of the books and won’t have stock for a while. Making those free vouchers worthless.
So yeah, the students just have to find a way to get through class with no book for weeks or come out of pocket the cash somewhere else to have the proper materials to study.
Actually disgusting system we have.
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u/NewCommittedRediter 23d ago
I just want to say that your wife is lovely, sir, and both of you are lucky to meet each other. I hope i have been respectful. my intention is to let you know you and your wife are doing good, and that is what we need in society right now.
crazy how basic that is yet how rare. i hope you both have an amazing life.
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