a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
raisin  ·  2937 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Multivariable Calculus by Jerry Shurman (Free Textbook)

No, most of them are not legal, I guess.

Piracy is rampant in the .ru world. I was born in Russia, and a lot of my friends (and my girlfriend) are Russian, and I can tell you that it's a sort of a national pride to not have to pay for stuff that can be found online for free. I was laughed at just a short time ago when I mentioned to a good friend of mine that I actually use Steam to buy my games instead of just pirating them. I guess a lot of it is due to the fact that large content providers are either non-existent in Russia (and probably most of Eastern Europe) or have a very small selection (like the Netflix catalogue in Russia, which at this point has next to nothing). So you'd turn to piracy because it's faster and it's free.

As for the moral qualms I personally have about it, again, I love paying for stuff when possible, and I usually consider myself to be a fairly upright citizen. However, I think I'm a complete opposite of you, because textbooks are probably the only thing where I have no problems with piracy, seeing how ridiculously expensive they are and how a new edition of the same textbook with rearranged exercises and some added info gets pushed into the university bookstores every two years simply to curb used books resale.