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Comment by cykros

21 days ago

In fairness, as a philosophy major, I realized fairly early on that most of what we read was out of copyright. I suppose if he's assigning stuff that is ABOUT what some philosophers wrote, it makes sense, but forgive me if I prefer just saving money to read Aristotle from Project Gutenberg.

And sure, there is more contemporary philosophy, and it's great he's keeping the books affordable. But if it's anything early 20th century or prior, don't be so surprised people are going to read what's in the public domain instead.

Haha what I remember in those cases was that the main value in having the assigned book was being able to same page during class discussions.

I mean, literally the same page — so if someone says “what did ya’ll think about this quote on p.156” I could actually get to it in time instead of scrambling to find the passage in whatever I printed out from Project Guttenberg.

For this reason my strategy to save book money was usually to get the assigned books from the library and camp out in front of the copy machine for an afternoon.