Downloading textbooks on the sly

JJR says:

interesting how unshakable patron beliefs are…
Before I finished library school and became a librarian, I worked as a circ clerk at the reserves desk at the university library. It was amazing how many students simply assumed that the library would have a reserve copy of their course textbook available for check out. I would tell them the same thing every time…”We only have it if your professor put a copy on reserve; Ask him/her to do so.”; Thanks to working there, I learned there are some high demand items that can ONLY be safely stored at the Reserves Desk, with tightly controlled circulation policies, because if put out on the stacks it is a virtual certainty they will “walk out the door”. We already lost a GRE prep book that way this year because one of our staff forgot to flag it with a “Reserves” flag, stuck in a “Reference” flag instead. I duly cataloged it, and assigned it that location code. Off to Reference it went, and from thence out the door, never to be seen again. Truly amazing.

It would be unreasonable, and a waste of library resources, to acquire large numbers of copies of university textbooks, even if libraries charged a rental fee to help try and offset the costs. There are already private “book rental” agencies in my university town. It’s not the sort of thing libraries should try to get into. Yes, textbooks are expensive, and I know students are on tight budgets. I wish Higher Ed in general was more grant-based rather than loan-based. But that’s an issue students need to take up with their elected representatives. Professors can help by placing a sample copy or two on reserve, but with the caveat that students ought not depend on these high-demand reserve copies.

Illegal textbook scanning/copying is going to land students in the middle of an expensive copyright lawsuit that will make the original cost of their textbook look like peanuts by comparison…don’t risk it!

Sidebar: I still consult my paper AACR2r2 and find it immanently usable.