• he/him

guy who was too into deus ex


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

Like, I knew of the us higher education industrial complex and how shitty it was. I assumed it was normal shitty, like everything else in this country.

Chat, I just had to pay 60 American dollars to rent a PDF and even once I resigned myself to pay I had to:

  • create an account in Macmillan's shit website, which involved rejecting cookies like five times
  • Enter my address, which was required but also the address field was not working so I had to start over several times and on different browsers. For a PDF. That I paid $60 so they would email me the "access" link
  • Wait for them to email me the link, which took hours. For an automated email to a link to a PDF file
  • Find that the link is actually to create a new account on a third party application.
  • Get a message that the link expired (it was just sent??) and request a new link.
  • Create the stupid account to finally be able to click on a link to open a PDF file on my browser.
  • But what if I need to read this literally anywhere else? Well I'll just click the link to "read offline"
  • Which has me scan a QR code to download an app on my phone, which also requires an account
  • I don't see a way to actually read this on my e-reader?? Offline?? In what world is "read offline" the same as "read on your phone with Internet access"

I fucking hope my professor is getting Macmillan kickbacks because there's literally no other explanation for this


calliope
@calliope

No the professor probably hates this nearly as much. A sort of cartel of book publishers and database owners hold universities hostage: they just kind of dictate what the schools will do and how they will pay. If they don't pay, they lose access to where all the useful research is (and that research is kept within the databases because the same people own the business ends of journals for the most part). If a university wants to try to open things up they have to be, like, MIT. Everyone else is stuck

What I know most intimately is LMS, learning management systems. The oldest and most ubiquitous will outright blame on-campus personnel for their mistakes, in front of those personnel. I've seen it happen; hell, I'm why it happened. I'm the one who asked why the system didn't do what it says it does.

And what are you doing to do? Not have a platform for online classes? Switch? You or got the Identical Service that Didn't Form an Agreement with the Competition Your Honor, We Just Stagnated at Exactly the Same Time. You've got Startup Scraping Student Grades for Smart Management Systems. You've got The One You Already Have but New(tm).

The capitalist takeover of the university system isn't because professors ignore book prices or get kick backs from digital reader companies. It's because the management class is all MBA jackasses who've never taught a class in their lives creating deal after deal to lock their landlord scams into certain financial vectors to siphon money out of the government and the students.


krveale
@krveale

I am a professor (well, that has a specific advanced rank where I'm from rather than anything else, but I fit the US job description).

I wish everyone who sees this thread and thinks "mood" to know this link and use it with our collective blessing:


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in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

  1. tell the professor how awful it is to get to; sometimes they care, especially since it's an accessibility issue now (off-line access, the problem with reading on-screen, etc).

  2. I suspect someone, somewhere, has broken that drm. I can only hope it's something easy like Adobe Digital Editions that even has a Calibre plug-in these days.

oh HELL no. to add to others' tips, you might be able to get it on interlibrary loan, or you could find an earlier edition for way cheaper (often they update every year), or you can get an "international edition" priced for international markets where those rates don't fly.

Tried all that and the library told me only two other institutions had this edition so it would be hard... Professor demanded latest edition and did not provide any guidance on what materials were different (but we do have assigned readings, a couple of pages from various chapters, for the first class)

It's such fucking bullshit lol

edit, saw the additions! all love and empathy if he is stuck but I am still pretty sure this dude could very easily have simply used an older version of the textbook for which cheap or pirated editions exist. I've had many professors do that, and several would flat out send a PDF themselves any student who requested one! Granted I was in school in the mid 2010s, but my understanding is that piracy is alive and well

Oh it's alive and well... I sent a PDF to the professor for my last class because it was a heavy-ass book and she didn't want to carry it around all the time lmao (she picked an older edition that was easy and cheap to get second hand or... find digitally)

in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

it's hell to get college professors to unionize, partly because of local laws (I'm in a "right to work" state for instance) but also because capital has spent decades now convincing the tenured professors they aren't labor -- which allows them to be more easily exploited of course -- but it also means the laborers are divided amongst themselves. An accident, I'm sure /s

in reply to @TalenLee's post:

in reply to @krveale's post: