Free and Reduced Textbooks

College textbooks are a serious scam Links to an external site., with the publishers getting most (as high as 95%) of the price you're paying for. The UBookstore is a great local business, but I mostly go there to buy stationary and not textbooks since they're getting robbed as much as I am.

Since we talked about academics this past Friday and are talking about research soon, I just wanted to let you know about a couple of good resources to keep in mind for college.

By the way, used textbooks are often as good as new copies!

The Onion Router (TOR) Links to an external site.

TOR is a proxy server that lets you access any country's version of a webpage. I'm including this here because the UW doesn't like it when we download textbooks. The good news is, if you use TOR, no one can catch you.

Libgen.rs (The URL changes sometimes)

This is what this page is mainly focused around. For legal reasons, I'm including a pictoral/step-by-step guide in a google doc Links to an external site..

Libgen is a Russian proxy server to get free textbooks and scientific articles. There is a lot of controversy around whether or not academic publications and articles should be free, but this database has somehow been up for 10+ years now. Basically if you type in a textbook and hit search under "Sci-Tech," you'll be able to download a copy of your textbook. Not all textbooks or editions will be available, but that's where this second site comes into play.

Amazon Links to an external site.

We've all used this before, but one often overlooked market in Amazon is books. Books are actually what Amazon was founded on, but Amazon's textbook market is also a solid option for up-to-date, reasonably (sometimes not) textbooks.

Simply put, just type in your textbook or book name and hit search. It should come with both Amazon Prime (which we can get as students for a reduced price Links to an external site.) and private vendor options. Again, consider buying a used copy if you want.

AbeBooks Links to an external site.

Aside Libgen, I get all my textbooks on AbeBooks since they support local and national bookstores. The prices on textbooks are also comically low (I've gotten a chemistry textbook for $2.50 before) because vendors on this site sell internationally.

Fun fact, all the textbooks we use get sold to international markets as black-and-white, card-stock books. They are almost the exact same as the domestic versions we have in the States, but are sold at their actual market price. Just goes to show we're all getting scammed, but now you know how to beat the system.