Does /sci/ purchase physical copies of their books? (I'm sure there's even someone out there that pays for ebooks lol). I'm specifically referring to books that you choose for personal use, not something you're required to buy at college. Or do you just download the pdf for free and make do with that?

Everyone is so obsessed with hoarding PDFs that the scientific and mathematical libraries in my university are basically deserted and almost every book is always available

Yes i buy books for like 200 bucks a month and my current collection is about 500+ textbooks, monographos, proceedings. Used books are fucking cheap, you have to be literally mentally disabled to not buy them

Used books savings on Springer books are practically non-existent. They're also fairly cheaply produced (POD) so you're left paying full price. Usually $30-60 USD.

*They're cheaply produced, so they don't survive many reads, so you're left ...

Must be an amerifatthing because Springerbooks here in germoney are in decent quality and usually cloth-esque bound and very cheap used. Those POD-Books are, if anything, just new from amazon and they warn you to buy them everywhere, some resellers don't even take POD-books

Wow. Yeah I've ordered from Springer directly and Amazon and it seems to be the same quality with both. It seems they do an initial higher quality print run, and after that it's POD in black and white, even if the original was colour. No price decrease either. You either get soft cover or hard-back which is horribly glued. The laminated cover they apply to the hard-backs easy comes off too. POD ink is really annoying if there's any glare in the room, it reflects back at you quite easily. 



For the price Springer charges, I could get a well-bound book from a quality publisher like Folio Society.

Thats why i never order new books off of Amazon, they are 99% bad POD-Books. If anything i order directly from springer and get decent quality for the same price

Right. And I should have clarified the quality is only the same for the initial run, then it's just POD and they don't always make it explicit. I really wish I could get clothbound from Springer though. Even in leafland, we get the lesser amerifat prints. Probably so they can save on shipping.

library sales are my go to. i get a box of books for $5.

what price for a pod of a pdf?

>>15389768 (OP)

i downloaded hundreds of books and i still haven't read any.

i still have a book on hold since 2019...

Do you mean printing it myself, at some place like staples? They usually won't let you do it if it's copyright, but I'm sure it's going to be cheaper than what Amazon charge.

What about the physical copies?

>>15389768 (OP)

>Does /sci/ purchase physical copies of their books?

Only if it's a good book. You'd have to be a sucker to buy a crappy book.

I only buy physical books for ones that I'd want to keep on hand to reference or re-read a handful of times in the future and possibly for gifting friends and family at times.

Other than that, I have a fuckton of ebooks, and will check out books from the local public library or my nearby alma mater uni library for ones that I want a physical copy just for 1 readthrough without any intentions of future reading.

>>15389768 (OP)

If it's something I'm going to use a lot, I try to find a physical copy (preferably a used one for cheap).

test
