Originally Posted by
PaulKarl
Relatively few are on Kindle or another e-reader. Even academic blockbusters like Orientalism by Edward Said and Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia are only available on dead trees. If you're researching in more obscure texts that are still in copyright, fuggedaboudit.
...or do what some broke grad students of my acquaintance do, and either download illegally (if it's available), or pool money to buy one copy of the book, scan it, and then share it out to the group (and/or the whole internet. Usually the whole internet)
It's usually easier to find illegal e-copies of books than legal ones. Two very brief searches suggest that the Edward Said book is trivially easy to download, the Camille Paglia one not so much so (but enough sites claim to have it that you could probably find a copy.)