Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Reading online 55 
required reading on your own printer as you won’t have easy 
access to the university library. 
QUICK TIP: If English is not your frst language, using ebooks 
will be easier than printed books as you will fnd it easier to get 
portions of the text translated online quickly. 
However, some publishers will not let you print out portions of 
the books you are reading online. Tis is because they rightly 
think that if you want a printed book, you can pay them for it. Be-
sides, have you seen the cost of printer ink? According to the UK 
Consumers’ Association, 
Which?
, printer ink is amongst the most 
expensive of all liquids, being more expensive than vintage cham-
pagne or designer brand perfumes (
Which?
Press Ofce, 2020). 
A typical university textbook would cost around £20 in ink and a 
further £10 in paper. But for the £30, all you end up with is a pile 
of printed paper, and it would be easy to get the pages out of order. 
If you really want a printed book, it is often cheaper to buy it than 
print it yourself. And I’ve not even calculated the cost of electricity 
used in printing the book or the wear and tear on the printer itself. 
It’s a false economy to print out ebooks. 
However, printing out portions of them is a good idea as it can 
help you get to grips with particular theories, for instance, or 
enable you to better understand complex passages. Some of the 
ebook suppliers do allow you to print out a few pages at a time. 
Or they allow you to save pages as a PDF fle, and then you can 
print that. Others do not allow printing or creating PDFs, so it 
will depend upon the ebook supplier your university uses. If your 
ebook supplier has disabled the printing option, the best thing 
to do is contact your university librarian. Te library will have a 
photocopying licence which allows them to copy selected pages 
of textbooks. If you are not on campus, many university libraries 
will copy the relevant pages and post them to your address. I know 
at my university the library will do this or post actual books to 

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