I don’t download games, unless there’s no demo to show me if it runs on my PC (a fair thing to know before buying it, I’d think).

I don’t download music available in stores or reasonably available for sale on the net.

I don’t download books I don’t already own unless they’re not available on the new market anymore (I’m also not a fan of buying used from places that don’t get royalties to the author).

But if someone told me “Hey, guess what? You can torrent every god damn textbook around at this site”, I’d be all over that. No compunctions whatsoever, not even the slightest hint of guild.

Fuck you, textbook companies. Fuck your virtual monopoly, fuck your overpriced 90% shit books that I’ll barely get any use out of if any at all, and fuck your compulsory purchases. Out of the wide variety of textbooks I’ve had to buy, there are two I’d actually consider good books, and got some use out of in my class. There’s a reason everyone just rents them or sells them back as soon as the semester is over. They’re almost always shit, because they CAN be.  Start selling them cheaper to start with, or make the value approach that insane $120 price point you put on ‘em. I guarantee profits will go up when people actually buy the new one in a situation that isn’t under duress, and they’ll stop desperately hunting for torrents.

Have you ever worked retail hell? Have you ever worked for a massive company that doesn’t know who you are and probably never will?

If you haven’t, let me put it simply-There is NOTHING that compares to the sense of pointlessness you feel. The fact you don’t fit in, don’t expect a promotion, a raise, anything. You just get complained at all damn day long.

I think it’s time we change that up as a nation. Now we’re all going to bitch and moan, that’s just our right as Americans. But let’s work on the other end of it. Did someone really help you out? Did you make a better decision, find something you couldn’t? Did an employee of this faceless store do something to aid you they didn’t have to?

Say so. Say “Thank you”, for one. Second, tell the manager. Every store has comment cards or a feedback phone number, why only use it when you’re pissed off? Let the employee know you’re doing it too, so you can get a last initial at least. Make someone’s day a little better. Give the poor schlub working for the man a chance to earn a little more money, or at least an “atta boy.” Everyone needs it. Especially anyone working for minimum wage.

There’s lots of ways to rent textbooks, and hopefully more digital options, because seriously, Coursesmart.com is awful. The online version contains intrusive watermarks and horrid proprietary formatting. You can’t copy and paste normally, when you use the copy/paste commands on the interface there’s random spaces inserted in the text, you can only print 10 pages at time, and when you click “next page” you end up at the bottom of the next page rather than the top.

To get an offline version of the book you have to use proprietary software and formats once again. Watermarked, time-limited PDFs are neither complex nor expensive to automate, so why stick with the shitsoft?

Oh, and there’s this failure of the digital medium. “Actual size” doesn’t work well particularly when you can zoom in and out of text and images. So, which is right?

Neither! Or either! Or both, if you change the zoom level and your resolution and the size of your monitor works for the demonstration!

Belts cost more than pants, and I find this inexplicable. Maybe I just buy really cheap pants, but I fail to comprehend why belts cost so damn much. Give me a buckle, a little thread, a need, and some beef jerky. I’ll make a belt. I’ll make a delicious belt, in fact, that you can eat if you’re lost in the desert. You can’t eat a regular leather belt, and certainly not a cloth one! But for 20 bucks, I can definitely make an edible jerkybelt.

So if I can make a jerkybelt for 20, why can’t I just buy a non-edible, single-function (well, I suppose making sure no child goes unbeaten is a secondary function) belt for less than that? I just want my pants to stay up, I don’t need the emergency ration, and I, like my friend, am pretty sure belts are just made from shoe scraps anyway. No excuse I say, not for this pricing!