College Students Increasingly Illegally Downloading Textbooks for Free

As students settle into the new
academic year, they’re also getting savvier about the high costs of
their education. “It’s hard (if not impossible) to know just how
prevalent this practice is,”
writes Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post, but
“more students are illegally downloading college textbooks for
free.”

She highlights a survey last month from the Book Industry Study
Group, which had some major
takeaways:

• Students report a gradual decline in the use of both core
  textbooks and learning management systems with a somewhat increased
  usage of online study guides, suggesting that pedagogical material
  is becoming more flexible in ways students value.
• Students continue to become more sophisticated in acquiring
  their course materials at the lowest cost as illicit and
  alternative acquisition behaviors, from scanned copies to illegal
  downloads to the use of pirated websites, continue to increase in
  frequency.

The group surveyed 1,600 students, 25 percent of whom said they
or someone they knew illegally downloaded textbooks. That’s up 8
percent from the previous year.

Strauss also notes data from a 2013 Government Accountability
Office study. It shows that textbook prices nearly parallel the
astronomical inflation tuition and have gone up 82 percent in the
last decade. An American Enterprise Institute Paper indicates that
in the last 35 years textbooks have gone up a jaw-dropping
812 percent – hundreds of percentage points higher than general
consumer prices, new houses, or even medical services.

Although students do by a
wide margin prefer hard copies of their coursework and illicit
copies can be spotty, any kid clever enough to get into university
ought to realize that spending on average over
$1,000 annually on books that have virtually no application and
little resale value the day the semester ends is not a wise
investment.

Deep web newssite Vocativ.com challenged itself to find books
for a range of classes at different universities and was able to
get them “one by one” almost “immediately.” They found “Ebookee and
TextbookRevolution, [which] focus more on math and science
textbooks. Others, like Free-ebooks and Freebookspot, have a deeper
selection of humanities-related tomes.” They also found success
with a site called Textbooknova.

“It’s so easy to find somebody posting a scanned copy” online
one master’s student at George Washington University recently

told The Wall Street Journal. The Journal
that it’s also easy to just rent, borrow, or completely forego
textbooks, so publishers are spiting themselves with their high
prices.

Textbooks are just the tip of the iceberg of university costs.

More and more young people are opting out of traditional
college as debt soars and they realize that trade schools, code
academies, and other alternatives like massive online open courses
are quicker, more effective paths to education and
employment.