Some educators have begun to utilize open source technology, but numbers on popular piracy sites make it clear those professors are the exception to the norm.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released numbers indicating the price of textbooks has risen by 800 percent over the past 30 years. Ninety-four percent of the GAO respondents who didn’t buy a book out of financial concerns admitted they did so even with the expectation that it would hurt them academically. The price of books skyrocketed by 82 percent in the years between 20, a number high enough to convince 65 percent of students to decide against buying a book, according to a Government Accountability Office survey. The College Board estimated in January that the average student spends $1,200 annually on textbooks. Many of the most popular books are available for free, with a correlation between the number of downloaders and the price of the book.

WikicommonsĪmerican college students struggling to afford textbooks are sharing copies of their books illegally on TextbookNova, the Pirate Bay and some of the same torrent sites that crippled the music industry.

Textbooks explaining programming and other technical language are, perhaps not surprisingly, among the most popular among students who use piracy websites.

Torrent textbooks