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Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

(torrentfreak.com)
337 points hn_acker | 3 comments | 20 Nov 24 23:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.724s | source
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elashri ◴[21 Nov 24 00:26 UTC] No.42199701[source]▶
> Z-Library, or a similar website, is helpful to students living in poverty (82% agree).

I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?

I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.

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1. melagonster ◴[21 Nov 24 01:57 UTC] No.42200291[source]▶
Maybe they do not need more textbooks? If they do not need to follow newest version of it, they can get second hand book.
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2. al_borland ◴[21 Nov 24 02:30 UTC] No.42200484[source]▶
Maybe I was a bad student, but I stopped buying books after my freshman year, unless there was a very specific reason to have it. I really didn’t use most of them.

I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.

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3. DiscourseFan ◴[21 Nov 24 03:06 UTC] No.42200705[source]▶
It depends on your major. For those who study English, for instance, many of the assigned books are out of copywrite already. And new books are market price so they won't be more than 20 dollars. And if you're in a not so conservative English department a lot of the "theory" texts, aside from the more obscure ones, are freely available online because they're written by people who care more about intellectual freedom than making a buck or two.