Expensive Books Inspire P2P Textbook Downloads 511
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.
About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't just that they are expensive, but that the publishers are trying to bilk the students. They include CD-ROMs they know are useless as an excuse to charge higher prices and they come out with a new "edition" every year that changes the page numbers and exercise numbers so that students can't rely on used textbooks.
They got too greedy and pushed too far and that is what will actually give people the motivation to push back.
Prices (Score:1, Insightful)
Text book to me seem unfairly maligned for having a hefty price tag. I suppose it depends on your exact experience, but say a book costs around $100 and that students spend around $400-$500 per semester. I know plenty of people who complain about that, and then I see them spending $50 a night "going out" with their friends, or buying dinner with a date for close to $100. A DVD costs around $20 and lasts a few hours. How long would it take to read a text book and learn everything it has to offer? Years in most cases. If you don't think that sounds like fun, why are you at a university studying? If you go to a good school that has you buy good texts, and not 'keep up' every year with whatever new edition of Intro to Calculus it out, you are making an investment.
I support this (Score:5, Insightful)
After having to pay for a new algebra book (75$'s) because, apparently, algebra changed since last year and the teacher insisted I have the new book.
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?"
Why would an algebra teacher insist on the latest book? Because his exercises are there so it makes it easy to correct? Why?
Who cares it's a rip off any way you look at it.
This is one example of information that should be free, or extremely cheap, at least when it comes to types of knowledge (math) that has not changed for centuries.
Textbook prices are determined by monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem here is that the price of textbooks has increased at a far higher rate than inflation. Students are forced to buy whatever textbook their class uses, so the publisher can set whatever price they wish - the students still have to use the books. Essentially, the publishers are granted monopolies on books for specific groups of students.
To combat this, many students buy used books. Many school bookstores offer few or no new textbooks for some classes, because they make a lot of money buying textbooks back and reselling them for more money. Publishers claim this further drives up the price, because they don't get a cut of resales. This may be true, but they've created this situation by pricing new textbooks so much higher than what their market can reasonably afford.
What they are really talking about here with changing the problems is shutting down the used textbook market. If you can't use the book from last semester, the used book becomes nearly worthless.
wow (Score:3, Insightful)
I've benefited a lot from the GPL, but in the back of my mind I've always considered Richard Stallman as something of a crackpot.. A bit too odd..
But the more I think about it, the more he makes sense. He's talking about software, but imagine if other knowledge was as free as the source code. Imagine how *anyone* could learn and be productive without the barrier of money.
Incentive for Profs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Photographic and tactile memory (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was in school I found my recall was highly photographic and associative. I assume this is present to different degrees in most people.
When I recalled something in a book I would recall where on the page it was and what was around it. I'd recall how far I had to flip into the book roughly before i'd have to turn individual pages. Even the weight of the binding was memorable.
I found I could learn more from books that had heavy covers, and glossy pages for easy turing, layots that were generous not compact with lots of color and visual reminders.
Thus to me a pdf file of a book on the screen or a Kindle are just viscerally anti-cognative even though the information might be identical.
The visceral nature of a book in not replicated on laser printed and bound paper. It just does not flip right for me.
Why was that modded funny? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sad isn't it?
For 99% of the courses, 99.9% of the material will NOT change from year to year.
Yet the textbooks are re-released almost every year.
Now, the only downsides I see to having Free (as in Freedom) textbooks available in digital form are:
#1. The answers to the exercises WILL be available on-line. So? If the instructor cannot come up with his/her own exercises then s/he needs to find a new job.
#2. Printing on a laser printer is more expensive than in a print shop. But if students only print out the exercises, they save paper anyway.
Any others?
Re:About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another industry's outdated business model falls victim to progress. Publishers and authors have a right to earn a living from their work, but so long as they're unfair about it people will subvert the system.
Textbooks are ideal for digital distribution - no shipping, no heavy books to carry, and they're seachable. They'll just have to drop the hefty, inflated pricing model. Sorry guys!
Publishing will go digital, kicking and screaming, but they'll go. Amazon knew this, why do you think they're pushing the Kindle so hard? As an avid reader I'm almost on board but not quite yet.
Re:Prices (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the "alternative" expenses you are talking about are OPTIONAL
and are a matter of CHOICE. They are entered into by the relevant
parties of their own FREE WILL and not forced on them by artificial
means.
If I want a good reference book for my profession I will seek those
out and don't need to be led by the nose by the University. The fact
that it might last me 80 years doesn't excuse the fact that students
are being raped on prices for content that may have not changed in
80 years.
This is just something else to drive higher education out of the
reach of the common man as if high inflation in tuition prices
wasn't high enough.
It used to be that $500 per semester was what you paid for tuition. It wasn't that long ago either.
Re:Photographic and tactile memory (Score:5, Insightful)
You can print and bind a book at Kinkos or throw it in a three-ring binder for well under $100.
Re:About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm of mixed minds about this. I support reasonable copyright laws -- "reasonable" being the operative word there -- and I object to piracy on general principle, but I have to say that the practices of some companies or industries are so egregious that I have a hard time mustering any sympathy for them. Textbook publishers are a case in point. New editions every other year, absurd prices ... it's really quite a racket. I remember one hydrology textbook that was about 200 pages and cost $70. I bought the book, copied every page at 10 cents per page, and returned the book the following day. Can't say that I was all that broken up about what I did. Seventy bucks for a 200 page book is ridiculous ... and that was more than 10 years ago. I can't imagine what that company is asking for a similar book today.
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
Hah, that will not happen.
They will offer them with some crazy Windows Vista only DRM, priced the exact same as the printed book, and then use the complete lack of sales as a "see, people don't want e-book versions" example.
(I really wish I was being a bit too pessimistic there, but...)
Textbook authors deserve to be paid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry but I can't sit and watch liberals destroy themselves in the pursuit of free works.
Its one thing that the likes of any number of political musicians might suddenly find themselves without a fat paycheck once CD sales approach zero, its quite another when the very academic backbone on the country is assaulted.
It takes an enormous amount of work to make a good academic text. You can't just learn something like physics by skimming a few blog quotes, or get a real sense of any field, for that matter, by reading books. Is it unfortunate that they cost a lot? Yes, it is. But books have always been historically valuable things and the bulk of that value has been in the content.
I've read MIT Open Courseware and a lot of it actually is not that deep. A few syllabi and class notes and homework assignments is not the same as the book the class refers to!
Textbook authors deserve to be paid. If you have a society where authors do not get paid, you basically wipe out the entire academic basis of learning in the USA, and with it, our country. People's quests for knowledge about the world will not go away when you get rid of books, and, instead of books, they will have their heads filled with muddy, wrong and incorrect web sites all measured more by how many clicks they get from adsense than any real academic measure of the value of the work.
Indeed, there's a lot of that already.
But hey, if all of these professors want to work for free... they are more than welcome to it, but I guarantee them this - preachers -never- work for free, and, if people want to screw over universities because they don't want to pay their authors, then, we'll wind up reverting back to a medieval society.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
I've benefited a lot from the GPL, but in the back of my mind I've always considered Richard Stallman as something of a crackpot.. A bit too odd..
But the more I think about it, the more he makes sense. He's talking about software, but imagine if other knowledge was as free as the source code. Imagine how *anyone* could learn and be productive without the barrier of money.
Hello... creative commons [wikipedia.org]?
Re:I hated buying textbooks.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A note on the 2nd trick. You have to be of greater than a certain intelligence. I used a Chem book 2-3 editions old for Chem I/II (It's freaking chemistry...). I couldn't use any of the "Turn to page XXXX" instructions. Homework never came from the book (there was no homework).
Worst case was they re arranged the chapters. Chapter 4: Reactions was now Chapter 14: Reactions. You have to be smart enough to know how to use a table of contents. I suggested this to my brother (freshmen last year) and it was lost on him. He broke down and ended up buying a book.
One more:
Buy from Half.com EARLY. Most large schools will post their required books before the end of the previous semester. Now is prime time to be shopping. You'll have them for the first day of school and know well ahead of time if they'll work.
Last resort:
For all my engineering books the Engineering Library kept 2 copies at all times that you could not check out. If you're waiting on a book or really want to kill time, you can live in the library to do your homework. If nothing else, just copy the problems out of it every few weeks and use your 'useless' copy as reference.
Finally, Engineers, keep your books. I wish I did. I can't name the times I've needed flow equations, thermo, controls, etc. Sure most of it is on wiki, but it's not in the format that you learned it. Unless you go straight into marketing or something, you're probably going to use something at least once.
Re:Books too? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you guys start stealing text books too just keep in mind that its the lthe little guys who will suffer like the unions who man the presses and the shmoos like me who are paid to put the book together.
Wow. Robots have actually unionized?
Re:Library of Alexandria (Score:3, Insightful)
In a way, political and legal earthquakes and mob burnings of free information sites are serving to strengthen the integrity and resiliency of a fast evolving Library of Alexandria, even if it is not yet labeled as such. One day such a data repository may also very well fit onto a key chain sized flash drive.
Re:Photographic and tactile memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Though I agree with you in practice, I think you fail to recognise that the same phenomonon can exist in digital media...
When I watch a video using my computer, I can very quickly find a segment of video by adjusting a slider, and I find that I am usually suprisingly accurate.
When I read a long webpage (mostly slashdot comments), and return to it later, I KNOW without a doubt that more comments have been added because something seems further down on the scroll bar than I remember.
The physical association can be translated to digital, especially if some thought is given to it. For example, what about a reader that applies a slight hue to the pages; eg as you get further into a chapter the pages become more red... I would bet that you could scan very quickly to a page with minimal practice. Add some sound whenever you change pages so that the tone changes depending upon how far into the file you are, maybe even include a visual "stack" that will show the ratio of pages before to pages after your current page.
With enough forms of reference, you will be able to train your mind to locate data in a file just as quickly as you do in a physical book. Then of course there is the clickable index, search functionality, table of figures (with thumbnails), etc... all this adds up to a book that is far more of a reference tool than paper books.
I don't want to sit and read a novel on a computer, or most ebook readers... but textbooks could be VERY powerful if implemented correctly. I am quite certain that the only reason that they haven't all gone digital yet is that the college crowd also happens to be one of the largest populations of copywrite violators and they know that they will only sell one or two copies of the book!
If I were them I would license text ebooks to the teacher/school instead of selling them to the students. For example, they 'sell' the ebook to the school to freely distribute to it's students, however for each student enrolled in a class that requires that text they must be paid $x. It would be relatively easy to prevent teachers from illegally using the text (offer a reward to students who report it) there is little incentive for the school/teacher to violate the license as they will simply pass the cost to the student as a fee, and finally the returns can be just as good as the license would only be good for that single class session.
It's only a matter of time... traditional publishing will die off eventually, it may take a generation or two, but it will happen.
Re:Textbook authors deserve to be paid. (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think anyone disagrees that the authors should be paid.
The disagreement is over physics books that update once a year and merely change the problem set from "an apple is dropped from 3 meters" to "an apple is dropped from 4 meters," for the blatant purpose of selling more copies.
While a textbook for a small field may require only a few hundred books to be published, justifying a rather large price tag, as the "author effort per book" ratio is high... this is not the case once your basic physics book reaches a print run of tens or hundreds of thousands of copies. For all practical purposes, versions 1 and 20 were the same book, and it's just gouging.
Re:I hated buying textbooks.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When returning books: Find the UPC of the "New" edition, slap it on your old edition and return it. Do it during the highest rush when the checkers in are just trying to get through everyone. I think I would net around $100 a semester buying $5 books and returning them for $30. Screw you book store.
Don't you mean "Screw you poor student who later bought this book and didn't realize the problem until it's too late"?
Re:Textbook authors deserve to be paid. (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is saying they shouldn't be paid. What most are saying is that the true market value of their work is much lower than what they sell their stuff for, mostly because they use highly unethical tactics to artificially increase their asking price such as
* Monopoly lock in (students have no choice but to buy their goods)
* Bribes to institutions and teachers
* New editions whose sole purpose is to make older editions incompatible so as to kill the second hand market.
Simply put, their business practices are unethical and dishonest.
Re:A good idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:About time! (Score:2, Insightful)
I paid about $100 for a physics textbook. I (and my parents) paid a couple of guys upwards of $2500 to explain it. Perhaps that was foolish on my part, but the cost of the book was mostly an unimportant detail.
Re:Textbook authors deserve to be paid. (Score:1, Insightful)
The deafening sound you hear is the full depth of this situation flying past your closed mind.
No one wants to screw the author.
No one wants to be screwed either.
There is a happy medium, Which will come about some years from now when piracy deeply impacts book sales. At which point most likely the price of new books, and worthless "re-editions" will both drop.
This is only a problem because the publishers(and sometimes authors) are trying to bilk more money out of an already tapped system. Since for the most part these people/companies seem incapable of a real value add, they instead resort to cheap tricks and collusion.
We can fix that for them.
Academic texts, meet reality... You can only fuck around so much before people get wise. Apparently that line was a little ways back.
Speaking as a publisher (Score:5, Insightful)
Me? I'm buying my own HP 8100's, my own heavy duty binder and laminator, my own trimmer, etc. and plan to shift all of my production except for large posters and some letterpress inhouse within two years, at most. And since I won't be giving so much of my money to jobbers, I'll be all the better positioned to A.) do short runs at much lower capital investment, B.) shift to tree-free paper and other resources the large, commodity printers don't want to be bothered with, C.) produce books with unusual formats, ink, etc.
In an age of print-on-demand and ever more standardized products from the ever more consolidated megapublishers, it's more important than ever to pay attention to these things. Their stuff may be getting more and more plasticized. My stuff [streetcarpress.com] will be getting less and less so. And from the feedback I'm getting so far, customers love this kind of customization and attention to detail, including people in the educational market. I've been speaking to some schools who are quite interested in having some input in what they use without having to pay or charge their students an arm and a leg.
Oh, and fwiw, I think that you mean "shmoes". Unless, that is, you're a gelatinous white blog that without limbs that can't speak.
Re:Thank god (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dirty thieves (Score:5, Insightful)
that's what exam boards are for:
"Why does your class have a 90% fail rate?"
"I insta-fail anyone who doesn't buy my textbook"
"Erm, right. We're giving everyone a concessionary pass and giving this module to someone else next year."
OTOH, this is my 4th year in taught academia, and I have only just come across a lecturer who directly set questions from a textbook - I always used to chuckle when I saw references to textbook exercises being used directly. If you get to give feedback at the end of the module - make sure that everyone complains about being forced to buy the textbook. During the term, make sure to complain to anyone within earshot about it too.
Re:Dirty thieves (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dirty thieves (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a Discrete Mathematics professor who did the same thing.
From TFA:
"It is troubling that there is a culture of infringement out there,"
It is more troubling that there is a culture of printing on dead trees with the explicit intent of making them obsolete before the ink dries to sell more of them.
Re:About time! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Which parts of the Newtonian physics principles will the textbook publishers try to claim is copyrighted"
You don't seem to understand copyright. If it were the principles that mattered then why not just read Newtons writing himself?
Re:Dirty thieves (Score:3, Insightful)
Nowadays, most profs aren't allowed (by either law, Board of Regents ethics codes, or by school policy) to require their own authored textbooks for taking their own classes.
[Citation Needed]
I took a course that used the prof's text book. The dept and/or university required him to donate the equivalent he would get in royalties. He was allowed to do this.
In my current university in a different state, another professor uses his own book as a textbook. Don't know if he has to donate anything or not, but he's been doing it for decades now.
How to solve it (NOT!) (Score:2, Insightful)
(Quote from end of article)
He said that if the problem worsens, publishers may have to take other steps to prevent piracy, such as releasing a new version of most textbooks every semester. The versions could include slight modifications that could be changed easily--such as altering the numbers in math problems.
"They may be compelled to," he said, "in order to stay one step ahead of the pirates."
(End quote)
Copying of anything gets easier and easier. Actions such as this may even encourage the development of a underground 'industry', that copies books and sells them in some form on the Web, or just torrents them. One of the key problems people have with these publishers, is their re-arrangement of material at an inflated price, just to be able to sell a new edition every year. Have they ever heard of releasing a supplement, with the new material? A complete new version every semester will just give them another reason to copy or download their books, vs buying a new copy. They really need to look at the recording industry model, and see how 'gouging' the customer on price at every opportunity is not how to sell more copies, and how new distribution methods such as E-Books (or equivalent) could make money for them, too.
Re:I hated buying textbooks.. (Score:3, Insightful)