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A comment on The rise of remote work may reshape college towns. Parent comment

Re:The rise of remote work may reshape college towns by tyingq on Friday June 04, 2021 @12:29PM (#27395333)
It's pretty rare, at least for my kids, that a course has an actual book you can hold in your hands. They all use a DRM scheme and require some Nth edition that's new (and probably only has a few minor changes from N-1). Sometimes we can find it on Library Genesis, often we can't. There's almost never an actual book.

Somebody is rent seeking.

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Re:The rise of remote work may reshape college towns by chrisseaton on Friday June 04, 2021 @12:33PM (#27395375)
Does this not apply in computer science? Is it something you get in fields like law? When I think of the key text books in computer science they usually just have two editions max and have been set in stone for a couple of decades as the basics aren't changing.
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Re:The rise of remote work may reshape college towns by tyingq on Friday June 04, 2021 @12:45PM (#27395530)
Not sure, none of my kids are CS.
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Re:The rise of remote work may reshape college towns by pfdietz on Friday June 04, 2021 @02:10PM (#27396843)
That was to inhibit resale of used books.
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Re:The rise of remote work may reshape college towns by sumtechguy on Friday June 04, 2021 @03:13PM (#27397817)
That and the tests. Many teachers like the pre canned tests these books come with (please finish problems 10-50 even by the next class). Now it is online run by the publisher. Cheating is now even more rampant than it was before the code thing with many sites having the answers.

I would wait 1-2 weeks after class started to buy books. Especially if the teacher decided you need 6 of them to finish the class. It was usually pretty clear which ones they were going to use by that point.

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