10 Ways To Save Money As A Student In America

Often, to streamline access of excerpts and other readings for a class, a professor will photocopy passages and compile them into a packet. At many colleges, the school offers a service to handle the legwork of copyright permissions, database membership, and printing itself. Based on their costs, they will then set a packet fee. Often, this amounts to less than purchasing new copies of the source material, but still more than resources available online, many of which are free.

Even if a student’s school doesn’t offer free online materials, many others do, for all to access. Some articles can be seen immediately, while others just require setting up a new account. At the most, still others can be rented a few days for a nominal fee. Authors could be upset about making fewer sales, but the flip side is that their work is seen by many more people.

As for full books, organizations like Project Gutenberg upload material already cleared into the public domain. Google Books is slightly more bold, challenging fair use laws for more recent material, and they've been sued for copyright infringement several times. Their archives, however, remain very comprehensive.