I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldn’t find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.

I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.

One year I was unable to find a textbook to pirate online so I bought a used copy, set up a camera on a tripod, photographed every page and returned it the next day.

Sounds like too much work but the book was worth more than my time to do it.