This is insane. There's no way textbooks should be this expensive. It's honestly a scam.
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Just spent $550 on textbooks
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Well, that's probably why they're so much, no?
Honestly depends on where you're going to school, size of your program, and a few other things. I know the government in Canada subsidizes a good portion of the cost for books. I spent more in Uni, maybe $400 CAD in first year, and that slowly shrunk down as classes got smaller and it was more about the core classes for my BA. I'm doing a college program now and I spent $100 last year.
GL with your PhD!
- Most of the textbooks are 30 year old graduate physics textbooks which have no ebook version
- I don't want to risk using something that's illegal. There hasn't been any case of an individual using and being punished by the government, but there have been cases of students getting kicked out of their program, and I don't need some petty blabbermouth who gets pissed off at me at some point ratting me out to professors.
Humanities (or social sciences, depending on the faculty) refers to history, sociology, anthro, poli-sci, and some liberal arts stuff like women/gender studies etc.
Maybe it's different in other places, but physics would be under a sciences faculty, with respect to his area of research (I.e. applied vs. Theoretical)
Tbf everytime I read textbooks I felt like my English is sooo bad, so I can see why some recommend not to do it.
It does depend on the subjects and the professors tho. There are some subjects that I don't need to get the textbooks, while others I need to read the textbook because the professor is just mumbling 😂.
Bro this just reminded me, i saw in the charity shop recently tons of school books for 2 pound each (textbooks and base level national 5's) for Americans this would be equivalent to SATII or AP courses, I went round a little late because i was busy and all the psychology ones were gone but i got 2 good media ones (Advanced higher and National 5) so yippee
unless you absolutely 100% need a physical copy why not just get a pdf and keep it on your computer for personal use? nobody's gonna rat you out that's just paranoia. If you're really that scared just don't tell anyone lmao its not hard. And if it's physics and the old version truly doesn't exist (the site I sent has almost everything), is there a reason you can't just get a more modern version on the same topic?
Modern versions often cut down on worked out examples. Recently I was looking at a 2nd edition of a textbook that has a 6th edition and the 2nd edition had a very useful example of fortran code for solving the schrodinger equation which got cut out of the newer versions.
You say no one's going to rat me out, but you'd be surprised what kinds of characters are in grad school. What I'm talking about is a much bigger problem in humanities than the sciences, but it still stands. I want to be able to work in study groups and not have a mysterious online version.
The thing is majority of the courses requires you to learn 5-8 chapters from a book which has 16 chapters. So buying a book that costly is not worth it given that the other half of the book is basically useless for your course. And most of the times you can find these books online or in your college library. I'm not sure how it is in America or his college.
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