My understanding is the cost of the PIC is higher if purchased without the training materials.
I don't believe that is the case, but rather, the more PICs you use per year, the cheaper PICs become.
am not in favor of the notion of pulling the pages out of the books....it is what PADI expects, but they printed the books with the knowledge review questions on the same page or back of the page that relevant info is on...ripping out the page makes the book less valuable as part of a personal reference library. The instructor is supposed to retain the torn out pages in their files for a certain length of time. My preference is to photo copy the pages with the questions, answer them and give the copy to the instructor. Not what PADI expects, not what all instructors are amenable to either.
I was amenable to that, and all instructors I had were. If someone writes in ink in your book, is someone else going to use whiteout to reuse that book? They'd have to be a really cheap b@stard to do that.