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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."
I think one of the reasons why publishers see ebooks as more threatening to their industry than the paper books is because ebooks will always be in "Like New" condition, thus it can be traded in the 2nd hand market at very close to the retail price.
And even with a slight price difference, (poor) students will always be more inclined to purchase the used-but-as-good-as-new ebooks.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
Sorry publishers, the future of education is free.
(at least you have entertainment to fall back on)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
...I refuse to buy electronic textbooks until they have zero DRM whatsoever. In addition, I don't even buy regular textbooks unless the professor actually uses them for graded assignments. They're just too damn expensive to do otherwise!
More universities need to make things like MIT's OpenCourseWare, or better yet, work together to make one big system.
Also, The Right to Read is a great story -- and is becoming more real every day. Everyone ought to read it, because it doesn't just apply to textbooks, it applies to music, movies, and other media too. Pay special attention to the notes at the end; the summary of the current trends towards DRM is downright scary!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ebook publishers should have their heads examined for going to such great lengths to inconvenience potential customers like this.. with books, the "analog hole" is a very easy and viable workaround for just about any form of DRM they can dream up. I know the article says they are backing off a bit.. but even so - it's pure lunacy.
Personally, I won't pay a dime for an ebook in any format other than PDF (or an alternative that I can view/print/copy in Linux). If they insist on using a format that can only be viewed in Windows, I'll hang on to my money and snag a "cracked" version online (even if that means downloading a jpeg image of each page; I have a couple books like that!).
Bottom line: the people who don't want to pay will find a way not to. The people who do pay will start thinking twice before their next purchase, since they're basically paying to be inconvenienced.
I graduated college last August, and I don't remember returning text books to the bookstore as a particularly exciting time - more often than not, I'd only get maybe $10-20 back on a book that cost me $100 at the beginning of the semester - and then a semester later, I'd see that same title on the shelf, being sold used for $80. The only people excited about book buybacks are the bookstores that can exploit them.
So I don't really see how the ability to return books is a big reason why readers prefer physical books over ebooks.
It is harder to lay back and read my laptop than a traditional text book. Until an electronic form comes out that is easy to lay in bed with and read for 30 minutes with shining a light in a face I will never use ebooks.
Basic textbooks for K-12 courses should be electronic and free. Mathematics, reading primers, languages... such things don't need new books every year. Schools are bankrupting themselves trying to keep up with buying uselessly new books.
And I am aware there are open source style e-textbooks becoming available, and more power to them.
People always ask why there should be cheap, low power ebook readers. This is why. The world needs them to teach its children without popping for several thousands of dollars per student to enrich paper mills and book publishers. And there's the small matter of losing our forests to this idiocy. Global warming is caused by an overabundance of CO2; the solution is TREES, as many as we can plant. That, and not killing the microplants living on the surface of the world's oceans, which produce half of the photsynthesis activity, but I digress.
But we're cutting more down every year. More parking lots, more gated communities, more cattle grazing lands, nore and more books and newspapers and magazines and laser printer paper. We need green growing things, STAT. And ebooks. Screw the market, some things are more important than making Bill Gates or whomever is used to making money even richer. Mandate the things by law. We need to start making a lot of things mandatory by law with a view to surviving the upcoming weather changes.
We've no problem with volunteering our troops or people in other countries to die as a sacrifice. Will we even volunteer a small a thing as giving up our paper books to save the world, or is that too much for our hidebound conservative asses?
Second, when one thinks of a text or referece book, this represents an incredible amount of effort on the part of the writers and editors. Gettting everything right is hard. For examples, the cheaper computer books are full of significant errors and misprints. Even reilly has a tough time getting it perfect, and these are often mid priced books. I am just now reading a Ruby book from them and in the first few pages is a passage that is either awkwardly presented, or an example is missing. Sure, if I am just reading it for fun that is acceptable, but since I tend to be somewhat serious in my computer stuff, I want the real things. So I have little problem paying more for something that is correct. When I was working computers, $80 for a good book was nothing compared to what is saved me on my jobs.
Now as far as school is concerned there are three issues. First, the writers have to be paid. These are often proffesors that have a skill of writing things down in such a way that a student has a good chance of understanding what is going on. They also provide relevent problem sets with solutions. The publisher has to be paid, without whom we would not have a book, as someone probably had to front some money. We also need a store, so publishers can ship limited quantities of books to certain well known locations for students to buy.
Now, here is the rub. College textbooks are not neccesarily that expensive. As has mentioned, at least some of the books can be bought used and sold, whcih means that any one book, at least at the lower levels, is unlikely going to cost more than $50. Second, books can be shared. Find someone in to go halfsies. And third, I had very few proffesors that actually demanded and checked we had the most recent version of the book.
So, what can be done. I think the publisher should sell electronic versions of the books that expire after one year. The books should be 1/3 the cost of the orignal book. Second, the univsersity should be able to buy an affordable site license to the book so that it can be read on any library computer. Finally, the reissuing of books for the purpose of stopping reselling must be halted, though this may not be such a big issue as with reselling no student will be stuck with more than half the cost.
My gut feeling is that most of this has more to do with the expectation of the student rather than the cost of the books. Books represent an opportunity cost to most people, not an investment. I think when someone buys a book, they are thinking of the beer that they cannot afford. OTOH, when someone buy a bag of chips and a coke every day for a week, they do not think of the book they could have bought. School is about education, and sometimes we have to give something up to become educated. On problem I see with the modern compulsary public educational system is that they parent and kids expect everything to be given to them. Clothes, books, supplies, transportation. Now some of this is appropriate, and much is needded. However to be educated one needs to begin to take some responsibility and sacrifice at leat a little. If that measn that a student does not get a new clothes, or a car, or even prefered meal, perhaps at the college level that is ok.
One last thing. Some of the increase in books relate to student needs. For instance when i was in college, the Physics textbook transitions from a simple black and white print with line drawing. This was a cheap book to produce, and for the amount of information was very reasonable priced. However, presumable due the MTV generation, it became a much more expensive book with color drawing, color photos, and the like. There was no more physics in it, no better teaching, just fancier and more expensive graphics. Go figure. Students paid more money and perhaps sacrificed education for glitz.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Even that has not changed much in 30 years. Fortran 77 is still used and the techniques are the same as they were when Newton and then Coates thought them up. The thing that has changed is the maturation of GNU tools and the availability of great numerical packages like the Fastest Fourier Transforms in the West. A text on the subject should contain a chapter of practical free computing, but this has little to do with the principles involved.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Maybe you ought to try making your own lecture notes and slides available, and not teach from a book at all. As a college student, that's the kind of class I prefer!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When you get the e-book, then you have unlock it with a key and send it electronically. If for some reason you need to re-unlock it and you still own it you should have to confirm who you are somehow. Secret answer to a question or a secret hand shake whatever. Then when you re-sell the book to a new student, they call up and get a new key and their secret handshake, etc.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Hate to break it to you, but it's pretty much impossible to sell back printed books already. Between the departments and the publishers, they do a good job of making the books very difficult to sell back (either by obsoleting them rapidly, or by making the books degrade rapidly through even casual use, destroying their value). Even selling my books online only gets rid of around 25% of the books I've bought, and always at a huge loss.
For example, I bought an art history text book for $120(!). This was a brand new book, and its first semester in use at my school. Partway through that semester, the department decided they did not want to use the book anymore. Not only did we not use the book for anything in class or for homework, but nobody wanted to buy it - the university bookstore would of course not take it, and nobody else seemed to want it. I finally sold the book 3 years later, at like-new condition, on Half.com for a whopping $10!
It's only getting worse, as well. Publishers often make the textbooks incredibly flimsy, especially for classes with huge enrollment stats (read: 101 level electives in science and the like). My geology textbook, although uncharacteristically well-written and enjoyable to read, is very poorly constructed. The glossy pages get creased, folded, and torn with just the slightest page-flip, and the binding is already falling apart after light home use (I don't take it to campus). Very scary how much damage has been done to my book, considering how I go out of my way to treat all my books with care.
It's pretty obvious that many of these books are purposely designed to last barely the 16 weeks of one semester, to ensure that they are less appealing for second-hand sales.
All in all, a very disgusting racket. The university and the publishers work together to screw students at every turn. No surprises here, but things are definitely not getting any better...
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
as a british student i've never really understood it.
can't your lecturers be bothered to provide sufficiant supporting rescources with thier courses?!
i'm coming to the end of my second year doing electronic systems engineering in the uk and so far my textbook count stands at
bought: 0
borrowed from my tutor: 1
borrowed from the library: about 4 or 5 not sure exactly
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Neither teachers nor students choose books. State boards choose books. Lies My Teacher Told Me is an excellent book for people interested in the world of textbook politics. (The book focuses on American History textbooks, but many of its points apply to others: biology, etc.)
You wan't to lower prices of textbooks, don't let professors teach the books they have written or edited. Or, if they want to use them they have to make them available to their students in electronic form for what their royalty on the individual sale would be.
Ask yourself this how many chemistry 101 texts do you actually need ? Pascal plus data structures, algorithmic complexity ? Electricity and magnetism ? Strength of materials ? These are subjects that have been done to death !!! What you have is a captive market in students, and professors looking to supplement their income.
Textbooks should be the cheapest books of a type you can by. The traditional markup on a paperback book is between 400 and 500 percent hardbacks are similar. The reason for this is that its hard to predict winners and books that dont sell are destroyed in mass. The process is called striping, the covers are removed from books and mailed back to the publisher. The reason books are stripped is because the publisher doesn't think it worth the shipping cost to have the book back.
Textbooks don't have the problems of regular books. A publisher knows in advance exactly how many books to print within a few percent. The bookseller if they know the books are going to be used next term can just keep them and adjust their order accordingly.
The only reason textbooks are pricey is that STUDENTS HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BUY THEM and that publishers are willing to bribe professors to get their books used.
Just Compare the price of a schaums guide on a subject to the cost of the textbook.