I'm not giving advice to today's students, I'm not even saying this is a true story. It's about grad school, but could be applied to undergrad as well (not that I'm saying it should.) In grad school (at least in my program) you have to read a LOT of books in the x years you're there, and then you're given a comprehensive exam covering those books. I think it was like 30 titles maybe. Each one could easily top $50 as a cover price, sometimes much more. It sure would be interesting if, say, one guy in your program got a part-time job at a print shop like Kinko's, you know, to make ends meet and help pay the bills. And if all your classmates got together and each one bought two or three books, they could then lend them to the guy who worked in a print shop. If that guy then spent time after hours (or not, if he had a boss who didn't really care), he could lay each book down on a photocopier, page by page, and make a copy of that book. Then he might just drop that copy into the machine and make enough copies for everybody in class. Could even perfect bind them or comb bind them or something. And then everybody could get all the books without being completely fleeced by the greedy greedy academic publishers. You probably shouldn't do this. It probably never happened. But it's an interesting concept.

Of course, nowadays there are online resources for finding free versions of expensive textbooks. You probably shouldn't seek them out though, and definitely shouldn't take advantage of them.