Slashdot Mirror
DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks
bcrowell writes "The New York Times reports that textbook publishers are backing off somewhat on the level of DRM used in the electronic editions of their textbooks. They no longer become unreadable after a certain amount of time, as in RMS's famous essay The Right to Read. Even so, most students aren't interested, because the books can't be sold back; the solution, however, may be to make it impossible to return printed books either. No mention in the NYT article of the steady progress being made by free books."
The used bookstore at my school seemed to function just fine.
Personally I held onto most of my textbooks, they contain a lot of useful information that I actually refer to.
Many of my profs would make allowances for people using older versions of the textbook when the changes were small. Fortunately most of the new editions were significant improvements and worth it.
At the same time people complained about the ancient thermodynamics book we used.
The worst that I ever saw was when the prof wrote the book, which contained a tear-out sheet of problems, and refused to accept copies of the sheet - only the original. The on-campus bookstore then refused to buy back the book because it was incomplete.
They've already got a pretty good solution to deal with the "problem" of students returning books -- it's called new editions. There are some texts that have a new edition every single year. Sure, the publishers are "getting screwed" out of one semesters worth of money, but that just means they need to release a new edition every semester instead of every year. It's not as if there are significant changes between editions as is, so that shouldn't be a problem.
They're working to release this as courses in Moodle format (which exports to IMS-LD) over the next year. Since these are "battleship"* lower division, high enrollment courses with top quality content, this may dramatically change the market of educational conten.
More:
* Dr. Jason Cole, Keynote, Moodle Moot Savannah 2006
This is true with some of the professors I've had. Newer editions of a book are not always required and in one case, the professor himself had a website with corrections on it just so that students wouldn't have to pay $150 just for the newest edition. As far as I'm concerned, unless professors specifically refer to the textbook a lot or give assignments out of the textbook, it's not worth buying.
However, the books I have bought I wouldn't think of returning. Why would I want to sell the book back (for a small fraction of the cost) when I can keep it and refer to it later on in the future.
You can also sell them directly to someone else, you don't have to go through the book store. MIT had a book swap at the beginning of each year where you could drop off books and ask whatever price you wanted. They'd keep them on display for a few days and collect the money for you. It worked pretty well for everyone -- you got better than the joke of a price from the bookstores and the buyer got better than the jacked up used price as well.
And for teaching a course on Compilers, I used the now-classic http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201100886/sr=8-1 /qid=1145828128/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6472017-6203054?_ encoding=UTF8dragon book. The advertisement said that the new edition was revised, but not in the print copy; the new chapters were available online as an electronic book for anyone who purchases the book. The additional cost for this e-book was about $40 (not optional).
To my horrid disappointment, when I went online (much later, after I started teaching the class), I found that the digital copy could only be viewed with some Macromedia-Flash like software on the browser, which would only allow you to view it page by page, no search, and no printing or saving the entire file either locally. There were no options to increase the font sizes for viewing the document comfortably either.
I felt sorry for my students and apologized to them, and after the semester gets over, am planning to write to the authors of the text book to look into the matter.
Suck suck suck.
:-D
Take code examples. Reading through explanation of the code in a real book, I can keep a finger at the location where the code is and occasionally glance back at it.
Scroll wheels, while a wonderful invention, do not offer near the usability.
Oh and lets not mention that, unless I have a dual monitor setup (like I can afford that, not to mention find space for it, since square footage is always at a premium), working on code while looking at examples in a book is nearly impossible.
Oddly enough, Unix man pages have none of these problems.
Oh, and ebooks suck for everything else academic in the world as well[1].
Math? I hardly need a monitor clogging up my workspace. When I do math, I push my screen back and pull out the pencil/paper.
Science? See notes about math. For higher level science classes that require working on a computer, see the notes about programming and e-books.
You want the ultimate evidence that e-books suck? I can pirate almost ANY required textbook for my courses in e-book format for free, but I still BUY the textbook. Ebooks suck that much.
Oh and lets not even mention accessibility. I have to be ON my computer? Or connected to the net and logged into a given website? Screw it. Give me a good ol' fashion bundle of dead paper.
Ah, being a CS senior, it is not like I use books anymore anyways. Google and Wikipedia have most of what I need, and most Unix things I can grab from man pages.
Given how textbook publishers (and school textbook stores) like screwing over the students, all of this DRM crud is not surprising though. Just this quarter, I found out that my university's book store is charging $80 for a book that Barnes and Noble has for $30.
[1]Giant unsubstantiated statement.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!