Dude. You have to buy the textbook. It’s a scam, and it’s been running for a very long time. My pet peeve is when the prof tells you to buy the fourth edition when you have the third, and the only difference between them is a few words.
Yeah, but you don’t know that it’s only a few words, unless you buy the fourth.
It is a scam. I think textbooks should be part of the tuition, and then the colleges would start managing the price of the book down. And using professors that teach from cheaper books.
I’ve skirted by many times by just making audio recordings of the lectures (being 1997 this was no easy feat, kids), and fudging the rest the best I could by going to the school store and skimming the chapters while pretending to shop. It worked pretty well.
If you know a bunch of people in class you could buy just one new edition for everyone to see version differences and to get its homework questions and then buy used ones for general learning.
Back in ‘77, I used a Bio I text that my mother had used decades before. The only thing that had changed was the pictures had been colorized.
There are many consumers, and the classic texts are used by everyone. The real problem is the racket to artificially keep the market supply small by issuing a "new edition" that is simply a rearrangement of chapters, or few new problems, or the addition of some supplemental material.
The current "classic" text in Calculus, Calculus by Stewart -- which is not really even all that good of a book -- has issued three successive editions where the only changes have been to the problem sets. Ridiculous.
I made sure to buy them all used, because I'll be damned if those tenured seditionists get a "red" cent from me.