Back when this happened to me, I had three courses over three semesters that taught from the same $300 textbook.
By the time I got to the third course, they’d moved to a new edition.
So I went to the library and photocopied all the questions pages and the answer key. While I was there, I discovered the library also had the instructor’s manual, so I gave that a quick read too.
What I’m gathering is always check the library for the instructors notes!
Also can’t they technically just give you a PDF with the questions. I never bought text books cause of that. I don’t think I’ve bought a textbook for school after highschool.
For me there were some text books you could just download from the author’s website.
When I went to university, some professors were just starting to distribute material in postscript; TeX was brand new technology. PDF had just been accepted as a standard. The world wide web was still mostly local to NCSA, and Gopher was the preferred method of distributing electronic academic material.
Today? There’s no reason not to use PDF or ePub. There’s less and less that should require a trip to the library unless you’re studying pre-turn of the century literature of some sort.
The likes of Elsevier and HarperCollins Education should not exist in 2025. But they do, and so here we are.
Back when this happened to me, I had three courses over three semesters that taught from the same $300 textbook.
By the time I got to the third course, they’d moved to a new edition.
So I went to the library and photocopied all the questions pages and the answer key. While I was there, I discovered the library also had the instructor’s manual, so I gave that a quick read too.
What I’m gathering is always check the library for the instructors notes!
Also can’t they technically just give you a PDF with the questions. I never bought text books cause of that. I don’t think I’ve bought a textbook for school after highschool.
For me there were some text books you could just download from the author’s website.
When I went to university, some professors were just starting to distribute material in postscript; TeX was brand new technology. PDF had just been accepted as a standard. The world wide web was still mostly local to NCSA, and Gopher was the preferred method of distributing electronic academic material.
Today? There’s no reason not to use PDF or ePub. There’s less and less that should require a trip to the library unless you’re studying pre-turn of the century literature of some sort.
The likes of Elsevier and HarperCollins Education should not exist in 2025. But they do, and so here we are.