alt Hacker NewsMaybe I was a bad student, but I stopped buying books after my freshman year, unless there was a very specific reason to have it. I really didn’t use most of them.
I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.
It depends on your major. For those who study English, for instance, many of the assigned books are out of copywrite already. And new books are market price so they won't be more than 20 dollars. And if you're in a not so conservative English department a lot of the "theory" texts, aside from the more obscure ones, are freely available online because they're written by people who care more about intellectual freedom than making a buck or two.