The High Cost of Textbooks and Its Consequences

While I have many students express concerns about the high cost of textbooks, few, to my knowledge, have failed to actually purchase them due to the high cost. (That said, any number of students have opted for e-book versions and/or electronic versions of selected portions of the assigned materials, all of which can result in substantial savings.)

http://chronicle.com/article/7-in-10-Students-Have-Skipped/128785/

And to the darker side of this, it looks like a relatively new site has come up (ala the P2P sites in music) where infringing content from copyrighted textbooks are widely shared:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-site-brazenly-trades-pirated-e-textbooks/32966