Slashdot Mirror
Textbooks With EULAs
overshoot writes "We all knew it was coming, didn't we? Now Princeton University and nine others are introducing DRM'd textbooks. For a 33% discount, students get a 5-month node-locked e-book instead of all that glossy paper. Maybe Congress should just get it over with and change the law to allow EULAs on printed works?"
I don't understand some people's (companies') obsession with e-Books. They didn't catch on. People don't like them. They're a royal pain in the ass. The article says that there are roughly $3.2 million dollars worth of e-books sold every year. $3.2 million?!? That's essentially -zero-. So why are companies still trying to push what has been proven time and time again to be a product that nobody wants? It ain't gonna work.
I don't respond to AC's.
For the record, Princeton University has not signed on to this program. Only the bookstore is involved, and it is not affiliated with the university.
I can't wait. The reason is that the US Federal courts have a long body of case law on the "first sale" doctrine. A publisher tried to put the equivalent of a EULA on a book back in the 19th century and got shot down, big time.
If someone makes the argument in court that they should be able to have a EULA on a book because they manifestly can on an e-book and there's no fundamental difference, the court is either going to have to twist itself into at least two additional dimensions to avoid either shooting down EULAs on e-books or overturning more than a century of fundamental copyright law.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Speaking as the manager for a textbook department for a university affiliated bookstore at a 30,000 population sized university, I have to say that I don't think you don't know very much about how much margin is in used vs new textbooks, nor what the average margin at all. The insane prices you are paying and the constant edition changes are due to one source: the publishers. Not your local campus bookstore. The bookstore is making roughly 25% on new and 35% on used. Those margins on a $8mil/year basis will not sustain a bookstore; ask any business major and they will tell you that that enterprize will float for a while and then sink like a rock. What causes the prices to go up constantly and more new editions in a shorter length of time is actually the used book market: the publishers get zero return when we sell a used book.
Contrast that with buying a tshirt or hoodie at a 50 to 60% margin, and you have what keeps almost all college bookstores afloat these days.
Additionally, our bookstore does buyback everyday we are open. We also automatically discount all new textbooks 10% from what the publisher's list price is. So: if a $100 MSRP book is being carried, we sell it for $90. If we have a used copy of that book, we sell it for a 25% discount from MSRP, so this book would be $75. At the end of term, we know that book has been adopted for the following term, we will buy that book back for $50, making your total cost on this book $25. Yes, you have to work for it by coming in early to get the used copy, and you have to have a little luck on your side when the adoptions roll around, and a little more in hoping that the book doesn't change editions (again, that's a publisher thing through and through), but it is possible. By my reckoning, you got ripped off shopping online, at least from a long-term perspective.
YMMV.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
I've purchased exactly one "e-book" from Spiderworks. Their e-books are very inexpensive--about 1/3 of the cost of similar books on the shelf--and much more useful. They aren't DRM'd either. Supposedly your name is embedded in the document's code, so if you redistribute it, they can track who leaked it. I'm sure it can be stripped out if you know how. You can download it as many times as you need on different computers, and they're Adobe PDF's.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
You sound like you are looking for Wikibooks. They are developing and disseminating free open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein