> piracy doesn't hurt sales

Funny enough, an academic department I know has cut back on its purchase requests to the university library, on the assumption that everyone, students and staff alike, is just going to download the books from shadow libraries. Individuals were never going to purchase a 400€ book from a scholarly press anyway, but if now institutions are on the piracy bandwagon, that’s a new development.

The publishers are playing shit games with faculty and providing free access for them to high quality instructional materials. To the point that the faculty doesn't really have to do anything for online classes(which is a whole other ball of shit).

The secret to why they can provide this?

The content is locked behind a code the student has to buy that provides access to the book or comes with the book.

It's absolutely disgusting. For profit bullshit is fucking the youth of America. It's disgusting.

Source; the three times I've failed to push my current instruction to open access materials instead of McGraw Hill bullshit. And it failed because the lazy ass faculty can't be bothered to develop their own lessons anymore. Fuck.