Expensive Books Inspire P2P Textbook Downloads

jyosim writes "A site called Textbook Torrents is among the many sites popping up offering free downloads of expensive textbooks using BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer networks. With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase." Having just completed graduate school, I can attest that quite a few books are in that more-than-$100 range, and that they're heavy besides. But the big-name textbook publishers are much less interested than I am in open textbooks, even if MIT has demonstrated that open courseware is feasible, and Stanford and other schools have put quite a bit of material on iTunes.

Re:I hated buying textbooks..

[veganboyjosh]

It's my understanding that a lot of schools will contract out the buyback program at their school, and there's companies that travel around and buy the old books, presumably to sell at other smaller schools, online, etc.

Once I figured this out, I brought a bunch of my used, older textbooks back to my current school at the beginning of one semester to return. some of these being from another school in another country. since the buyback company's software had the isbn/book in its system, they gave me credit for the book. I came back the next day with a bunch of my wife's old textbooks, and some more of mine, and after one or two books came up not in their system, a supervisor came over and informed me that I couldn't just unload my old books onto them, despite their computer having accepted them, and despite the posters everywhere talking about "unload your old books...this week only..."

There are ways to do this

[The Ancients]

Our Introduction to Finance course in uni had a decent approach to the textbook issue. We had the option to purchase the text book, but were also given free access to a PDF version of the book online through our uni intranet, which was locked to prevent printing or saving.

Yes, having to view it online was slightly inconvenient, but for many cash strapped students it was less convenient than having to fork out wads of cash for the print version.

Before anyone says it - yes, I mean 'free' as in we didn't have to specifically pay to access it - of course there's fees and such forth that cover the cost.

Re:I support this

[i.r.id10t]

Some teachers get a kickback (esp. if they are the author of the book) but here in Florida a law just passed that prevents requiring a book that the teacher wrote, unless it is on a departmental level (as opposed to the course level)

Textbooks = hidden tuition.

[wcrowe]

It's been a number of years since I worked as an adjunct professor, but even then textbooks were outrageously expensive. I didn't even want to specify textbooks for my classes, but the school administration would always force me to pick one to use for the course. The reason was that the school made money from every textbook sold. It killed me to force struggling students to purchase expensive textbooks that they would hardly use, but I didn't have much choice. In a way it was as if the school was hiding part of their tuition within the book costs.

 

Re:I support this

[wanerious]

The majority of cost for me to go to a community college here in California is the books, and it is such a scam by the book companies, which also left me wondering "does the teacher get a kick back?"

Yes, teachers do get a kick back. One of my professors told our post grad class (during one of the much loved 'pub lectures') how they could stand to make $1000s from recommending the 'right' books.

I'm a physics/astronomy professor, and this is news to me. In fact, there is a state law (OK) that prevents us from receiving *any* financial incentive from textbook reps. In fact, it is even illegal for us to sell our evaluation copies. There are always unethical people on both sides of the street, I suppose.

Re:Dirty thieves

[stranger_to_himself]

Academics often contribute to textbooks without being paid. I wrote a chapter for a textbook recently and am currently working on another, and I won't get any financial return for either - I consider it a part of my job. Having said that the books do turn out to be quite expensive, I put that down to the low numbers the publisher expects to sell.

Writers of very popular course books will get some return, but for most of us writing specialist texts this isn't the case.

Students are suffering already

[betterunixthanunix]

No offense to you, but students are already suffering. We are routinely charged for books that are simply rearranged copies of older editions, just so that we cannot buy used copies (professors often assign problem sets from the book, and if the problems are in the wrong place and in the wrong order, or have modified details, it becomes impossible to do the homework). We are charged as much for the rearranged edition as if it were a book containing brand new material.

I'm sorry, I know your job depends on the publishers being able to rip us off, but most of us don't have jobs. I've been able to land decent summer jobs because of my skills and major, but the majority of my friends are either unemployed or will not make enough money this summer to completely cover the cost of their books. This expense is added to the price of tuition, which some of my friends can barely afford. If the new American dream is to go to college, get a degree, and make lots of money, these publishers are pushing more and more people out of that dream.

I'm not exaggerating, by the way. A lot of people have trouble coming up with the money for textbooks. A single $100+ book would be manageable, but when it is a matter of 6 or 7 such books every few months, it becomes a problem. It flies in the face of copyright law (pre-DMCA), but I can see why people would turn to torrents to get their textbooks.

Buy International Editions

[usefulidiot127]

As an engineering student I realized right away the idiotic amount of money I could end up dropping on text books. I've found buying paperback international editions from websites such as abebooks.com is extremely cost effective. I can buy a 170 dollar book for 11 bucks plus 15 dollars shipping. Every semester these books change, rendering my purchases worthless. If I can do without a book, I'll do without it. If I can't, I'll buy from India. I can't believe how many peple just sit around and pay these obscene prices.

Re:Dirty thieves

[necro81]

There are very, very few academics that make any kind of living off of doing textbooks. Fewer still make the sort of per book royalty that you are assuming exists. It's usually more of a one-time payment. Professors aren't like John Grisham or Tom Clancy.

Changing editions every few years is something done by the publishers. I know, I used to work very closely with the local (independent) college bookstore. We would specifically try to get used copies of books that professors request, because it would be cheaper for students (and undercut the corporate-owned bookstore down the street), and only then resort to new. But, when a publisher changed the edition, the used market for that book would dry up. I don't know where all the old copies went, but usually we couldn't even find them.

The site is already down.

[bigbigbison]

I went to take a look and see if there was anything interesting and the site has already gotten a cease and desist from Pearson Education [textbooktorrents.com].

Re:Dirty thieves

[bcrowell]

You are stealing from the pockets of the professors who change the text book every semester making your used book worthless.

There are some logical and factual problems with your post.

• First off, if a book is being changed "every semester," then that's not changing from one edition to the next of the same book, it's changing from one book to some other, completely different book. That doesn't happen because a professor is trying to line his pockets, it happens because a professor tried a book and didn't like it. New editions do come out more often than they should, but new editions of a book don't come out "every semester."
• The typical college textbook has to be used by dozens of different schools if it's going to be commercially viable. The most successful books are used at thousands of schools. Therefore the chances that the professor making textbook choices is also the author of the book are fairly small.
• I think the real phenomenon you're really trying to describe, in a garbled, confused way, is that the publishers bring out new editions of books about every 2-3 years. Yes, this is an abusive practice. Yes, it's meant to kill off the used book market. Yes, it tends to enrich the author of the book. However, what you don't seem to understand is that when this happens, the professor who's using the book in his course has absolutely no choice in the matter. I'm a college professor. Here's what happens in this situation. The book rep shows up at my office, we chat a little bit, and then she gets to the point: the 9th edition of Halliday and Resnick is coming out in a couple of months. The 8th edition will no longer be available from the publisher. Here's the ISBN on the new edition. Here's a free copy of the new edition. The bookstore will have to order the new edition for next semester. End of story. I have no choice whatsoever about whether to switch to the new edition. There's a bad guy in this story, but the bad guy is the publisher, not the professor using the book.

Re:Incentive for Profs?

[bcrowell]

Why do professors always want to use the most recent version? Is it only because they know everyone can get a copy? Wouldn't it be easier (and legal) to solve this problem by publishing a page-number alignment table so that ALL old versions could be used in the same class?

I'm a college professor. We don't have any choice about changing editions. The old editions just go out of print. The actual changes from one edition to the next may be minor, and students who are able to get their hands on an old edition may be able to figure out, e.g., which homework problems have been renumbered, but there's no way the typical professor is going to go to the amount of effort that would be required to publish conversion charts, etc. You also have to realize that the bookstore is not interested in getting stuck with books that they can't sell. Even if some students might be willing to use an old edition, the bookstore isn't going to sell used copies of an old edition, because it would create a huge hassle for them. They's get students buying the used version, then finding out it was an old edition and returning it. The bookstore then has to process the return (which is expensive and time-consuming for them to do), and is stuck with an expensive book they can't sell and can't return.

Re:Dirty thieves

[Anonymous Coward]

half.com

Re:Dirty thieves

[BrentH]

That is actually illegal, is it not? You are allowed to sell what you bought, no matter what.

Re:Textbook authors deserve to be paid.

[MadMidnightBomber]

Most professors make bugger all from their textbooks - try asking a few before you go off on a rant.

I write a couple of articles here and there and once you calculate income per hour it's less than minimum wage.

Re:Piracy? Or Completely Legal!

[monxrtr]

Sure. Here they are.

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

Nothing there. Completely nonprofit noncommercial and completely for educational purposes.

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

Uh, what is it's nature? It covets? It's nature is that it is infinitely reproducible information, itself containing many aspects of public domain non copyrighted knowledge. It only seems fair that one be able to enlist an infinite team of interns to comb the file to make sure there are not any copyright infringements (or instances of plagiarism, or instances of incorrect attribution) in the file. Anything less is a civil and criminal violation of free speech and the Legal Discovery process.

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

They had better damn well not be included any single instances of public domain non copyrighted ideas or expressions in their circumscribed copyright claim. If a physics textbook contains the formula E=mc^2, there is certainly no valid copyright claim on that expression. So add those up and SUBTRACT from the "substantiality of the portion...as a whole."

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

If they are no longer selling last semesters edition, they have no valid claim to be seeking profit from last semesters edition. Thus, we will always be one edition behind on their tails. And Professors already copy the entirety of many copyrighted works for the entire class, such as newspaper articles.

Plus not to mention we can divide the torrent into as many different sections, chapters, diagrams, and/or words as we desire. Infinitely divisible + infinitely re-combine-able = FTW. So download chapter 1 today, chapter 2 tomorrow, etc, however you want, whenever you want.

Yarrgh! Bring on the countersuits of illegal spying, unlicensed gathering of evidence, negligent non identification of specific individuals, harassment and stalking of students. They'll just be financing some free tuition plus graduation house gifts until they give up, utterly defeated, utterly destroyed.

Satisfied?

Re:Photographic and tactile memory

[monxrtr]

Every printer and copier (manufactured by the big name manufacturers you have heard of) in the world has unique finger printed water marking that identify its serial number, and where it was sold. Thus if a criminal printed off a threatening letter and mailed it to somebody, that letter can be identified to have been printed from a specific copier or printer. Perfect for setting up a stakeout of somebody printing leaflets from a specific Kinkos shop in a specific city on a specific street. I don't know if the intel companies paid for that technology, but they certainly convinced the manufacturers to implement that technology.

Re:Dirty thieves

[no1home]

Here in the US, many students feel that the tuition buys good grades, studying be damned. Classes have, in many but not all cases, been dumbed down for this very reason. Students (and their parents) have sued over and over again for grade increases AND WON, despite the fact they frequently didn't deserve the better grade. So, actually, the professor should be very afraid of a law suit, warranted or otherwise. Our universities still produce some great minds and great workers/creators/etc., but the grade inflation and resultant increase in useless or near useless graduates threatens to make our universities irrelevant to the rest of the world (though still required if you want one of the few jobs available here).

Cartelized publishing industry, negligent editors

[dsgrntlxmply]

Go look at the corporate Web sites for Thomson or Pearson (two of the worst offenders, in high prices and in ridiculous weight of the books and in edition-churning) and read the histories. These conglomerates have consolidated a former diversity of publishers, leading to a much less competitive market.

It is the duty of the student-consumer to fight back by using arbitrage: international student editions.

One example: Introduction to Electrodynamics by Griffiths. Amazon shows $107.20, list $134.00. You can order it from India for maybe $45.00 including shipping. It arrives quickly. Then you look at the rupee price sticker that someone left on the book, and find that it sold in India for the equivalent of US$4.50.

You get the book for less than half price, and some enterprising fellow in India gets a 7x markup (I'm subtracting the cost of shipping).

Chances are that the international student edition will also be more convenient to use, in that it will be printed on ordinary paper rather than the cripplingly heavy clay coat paper that nearly all American editions of textbooks are printed on.

I weighed a recent edition of a popular introductory biology textbook (Campbell) ... over 7 pounds. One cannot study from such a book, much less lug it around on campus.

At these outrageous prices, one might expect that the publisher would be doing something apart from ringing the cash register and permuting pages to create new "editions" to force obsolescence.

Wrong. The editors are too busy making new editions to pay attention to essentials. Textbooks, especially the back-of-book solutions, are rife with errors. Errata, if they are issued at all, are often far from complete.

The editors, despite their great energy at creating new editions, appear to have little or no expertise either in the subject matter or in pedagogical technique.

Fowles and Cassiday's Analytical Mechanics lists for a whopping $204.95 ($163.96 from Amazon). This book spends pages on marginally relevant historical discussion, then in the essential material, explains so little and skips so many steps in derivations, that one is left hanging off the edge of a cliff for topic after topic. Don't get me wrong: historical discussion is wonderful, but not when it uses page space that should have been used for more complete exposition. Especially when the page space is priced like Manhattan real estate.

I have found that it is useful to buy cheap old used copies of classic textbooks, from a time before color illustrations, dense clay coat paper, and edition-churning. Many of these books are clearly superior to modern editions.

The publishers are evil and need to die.

Re:Photographic and tactile memory

[kmac06]

Thanks for the response. In your OP, you said:

Every printer and copier (manufactured by the big name manufacturers you have heard of) in the world has unique finger printed water marking that identify its serial number, and where it was sold.

The link does not say that at all. It says that by looking at the printing characteristics, you can identify the model of the printer (i.e., just by data that appears in the printed image as a byproduct of the printing process, not by anything intentionally added by the manufacturer). Furthermore, there would be no way of identifying which printer of a certain model made the printed image without having reference pages to compare to.