If you have the money, please spend it; some of us who can’t afford to spend that much would sincerely thank you for helping us pay the writers to keep writing. For the few of us who, upon visiting the bookstore noticed the price of the textbooks and felt like we’re having our skins being pulled off us alive, here is a guide on easying the pain (or avoid it).
As a disclaimer, I didn’t put any of this books out there, I just found them out and, in the spirit of a student struggling his way through college, I prefer ‘free’ to paying. This is a guide for finding free textbooks online, most of them downloadable, readable and usable for your class.
In the unlikely event that you can’t find that free textbook online. I further suggest ways to get around still having to buying, and there’s a reason I called myself, a hustling student. Let’s get down to business.
But before, I should warn, downloading copyrighted content might be unacceptable, discretion is strongly advised.
Required tools:
* Torrent Client: I use utorrent (www.utorrent.com). This is the interface between you and your downloads, let’s skip the technicalities. There are options for Mac or PC, get the applicable version and let’s move one.
* 7-zip: Most of the downloaded would be compressed into “.rar” format. To decompress, download this tool from www.7-zip.com (again, it’s my preferable tool).
* [Luxurily] Subscribe to www.rapidshare.com (€ 50)
Those done, here are some of the best sites to [hopefully] find what book you’re looking for without much digging. For most of the site, type in the book (or author’s name) you are looking for and if it finds it, it shows up, click and download.
For some, you will most likely need just the 7-zip tool to uncompress the files. And others (the torrents), you would need download the torrent, open it with the utorrent you had installed previously and wait.
I should add, finding what you need sometimes might take a great deal of patience. If these sites fail to produce what you want, you can revert to the dear ol’ Google.
Try using any of the following search quaries:
[ insite:rapidshare.com "name of book or author here" ]
[ insite:megaupload.com "name of book or author here" ]
[ name of book/author+torrent ]
or try plainly,
[ name of book/author+download+free ]
One never know, it might take some time to dig what you want out, but it pays off comparable to the cash that has to be shelled out at the bookstore.
And if all these fails, and the library doesn’t have an extra copy, and you really, really need the textbook; as in, you really need it, you know what to do.
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No longer in school. My technique was to borrow the book from the library or simple skip the book and join the discussions. This is great content for an Ehow.com How To article. – Just a thought
Twitter: delomos
says:
Most times the borrowing from the library is too restrictive, and there are just some classes that one can’t skip not having the text.
On adding it to http://www.ehow.com; great suggestion. Not sure how to proceed on that.
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