Another sign of old age

I had never even heard of illegally downloading textbooks!

Some of the illegal texts available online are copied e-books, while others are paper editions that have been painstakingly uploaded page by page with digital scanners. “Is it some kid sitting in his basement doing the scanning? We don’t know,” said Allan Ryan, director of intellectual property at Harvard Business Publishing, an arm of Harvard Business School.

I bought several textbooks in college, and only one of them was actually used in any kind of serious way in the class. Given how expensive they are, how terrible the material often is, and how little most professors utilize them, reading pieces online makes a lot of sense.

Back when I was your age, we just all borrowed the book the night before the test from the one kid who bought it.