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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."
Professors are a big part of the problem. Why do they keep requiring new editions when there are plenty of old ones on the used market? The main difference between an older and newer edition is the homework problems, so students can't use the old book when the new one is adopted for the class. I think there are payoffs between profs and book publishers.
In general, there is no secondary market for digital goods. Either it has DRM which disallows resale completely, or it has no DRM in which case people just copy it for $0. In theory there could be "friendly DRM' that allows resale, but if publishers feel threatened by it they can simply not use it.
So long as there are printed books: the public library and the university library.
... not in any academia though).
Publishers are starting to use a cookie-cutter methods to putting academic textbooks together. Include a CD-ROM with little or no information. Add colour pictures which add nothing to the learning experience. And revise the edition every year so that most books are in their 10th or 20th editions. Each year, as these "features" increase, the cost becomes higher. I won't even mention how many typos and errors there are without an Errata available (at least most computer books are good for that
Hence, I just borrow the book, take notes and return.
Oh, and this idea that selling revew copies raises prices? Nice try publishers (cheaper alternatives should lower prices, not raise them). Don't send out unsolicited review copies and then tell me how to use them if you don't like what it does to your profits. Because I will sell them at a big discount online.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
There is considerably more difference between the books than just the homework problems. Part of the problem is the gratuitious shuffling of material within the text book. I'm a professor in Computer Engineering. For the past five years I've been using the 6th edition of one text book for my operating systems class. I have planned all of my lectures to more or less follow the text book so that the reading assignments for the students are clear. I make references to the examples in the text, and introduce new examples of my own.
Last spring the publisher issued a 7th edition. I took one look at the book and realized I would have to completely revamp my course.Material was presented in an entirely different order, and in some cases the presentation of the material was substantially different. I requested the bookstore to order the previous version (buy out the old stock). Unfortunatey, the publisher only shipped the new edition. I had explicitly filled out the form for the book store to buy back the previous edition. So I ended up with a class with mixed old and new editions. It turned out the be a mess. I kept the same outline of classes since most of the students had the old edition and I updated the reading lists on my course web site to give the page numbers for each class in both old and new editions. Even so I constantly got complaints from the new students about how they were constantly confused because I kept skipping arround in the text (which, from their perspective, I was). So now I face a dilemma. Since the balance will shift to more new editions (7) over old editions (6th), I have to spend many hours this summer revamping the course to match the new textbook. This will benefit the new book students and the students who buy the older book will be disadvantaged because they will have to jump all over the book. If I require the new book, then I get students like you who claim that the only reason I do this is because I'm in bed with the text book representative. If I allow the old book, then students will complain that I don't follow the textbook and that there is no point in buying it at all because it is too confusing. I'm damned if I do, and damned if I don't.
Absolutely not. I have never recieved any benefit from a publishing company other than the free copy of the book that they send when it first comes out. That free copy then becomes my reference copy if I choose to adopt the book. There is some revenue if the prof is the author of the book, but since my research area is not Operating Systems, it is unlikely that I will ever write an OS book. I would advise you to think before you make such claims, it makes you look like you really don't know what you are talking about.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
One of my profs was writing his own book. We got to beta test the book, so we got early copies from the photocopy centre. I think for the semester it ended up around $CDN 30. Which is pretty good considering the price that the book is selling for now. He even gave prizes at the end of the semester for students who found the most mistakes.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Modern OCR programs can pull out pictures and text with very little drama & some of them can handle science and math content just as easily.
Other than a lack of motivation, what's stopping people from buying (or borrowing a laptop with) someone's e-book & running a screen scraper + OCR?
Save the output to a PDF & you're done. You don't even have to try and crack their protection scheme... Or am I missing something here?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why don't you hold onto the book until the next semester and sell directly to other students?? The reason that bookstores 'exploit' students is that people like you let them.
I made it through a masters degree in engineering without buying a single textbook. Maybe twice a semester I had to go to the library to get out a course text to find something I needed that was only in a set text.
The rest of the time general texts, internet resources and lecture materials covered the gap... so what's the big problem elsewhere?
Beep beep.
I've gotten more back for a book than I'd payed for it at least once. It was one I bought used off Amazon, I believe. I did that with some crappy Xbox game as well, payed $5 and got $10 or so for selling it used, plus I used it in some deal they had.
The article suggests students are slow to adopt digital textbooks because they can't resell them at the end of the semester.
But why should students do this at all? As one law school textbook author has suggested, why not include the price of textbooks in tuition? As he notes, "It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs."
Yes, tuition would have to go up accordingly, but once the textbooks came out of the school's funds instead of the students', professors would have to justify their textbook recommendations, instead of putting down a bunch of "required texts" that they refer to only lightly, if at all. Perhaps if such a scheme was in place, schools would find that it is in their interest to push digital textbooks more aggressively to keep down the costs of maintaining an inventory of textbooks from semester to semester.
We had a text for one of our more obscure courses that wasn't very good but it was fit our needs better than anything else. It went out of print. The publisher made what was basically a photo-copied version available to us as a paperback. The price to the students was $150 and many of the pictures and graphs were illegible. I cancelled that text because I couldn't stomach seeing the students ripped off like that. We're working on an on-line text which the students can use for free. So, the greed of the publisher has resulted in a loss to them of many thousand dollars per year.
Increasingly, I am finding other profs' course materials freely accessable on-line. In many cases the on-line materials are better than the available texts.
There's no reason for that to be the case. Music, for instance, is trivially easy to copy, and yet purchases continue.
I can see a similar future for eBooks... Sell them for $5 a copy, making it so cheap and convenient that it's not worth doing something illegal to avoid paying. However, that inherently makes the "second hand" market just short of completely dead.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No, basically that's like analog copying of audio content. Play it and re-rip it to an unencumbered data format.
The downside is that you might lose some formatting, and the quality of images decreases (think original = SVG; your scanned copy = crappy png maybe). Maybe you have to manually recreate some sort of index, if you care about that.
Of course for simple novels or other sequentially oriented textual stuff, screen scraping is just fine.
I am a student who is interested in electronic versions of my textbooks. I have a shoulder injury that prevents me from carrying much more than my laptop to class.
I have fantastic PDF searchable (and legal) copies of my gaming books from Steve Jackson Games, and can't understand why similar versions aren't offered for text books.
This quarter is the first time a 'hybrid' electronic version was even offered. This hybrid was $53, for a few paper pages, along with a code to get me into the online content for the rest. My problems with this, is that I would be more than happy to pay $20-30 for what I need, but to charge me the same amount as last years paper text seems greedy.
Still, despite the cost issues, I would still pay for it because I am physically unable to carry my books around. At my college no one has access to any electronic versions at this point. At least no one ever knows anything about such a version when I ask.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0412107 has a paper by me and a friend (who is also a physics professor) on how terrible introductory physics textbooks are. The paper itself is open source, by the way, and the source is available at the link above (click on "other formats").
The paper includes prices and weights for most of the textbooks. For the first version of the paper, about a year ago, we checked the prices and shipping weights by hand at Amazon. For the revised version last month, we wanted to complete the table -- but the already-checked prices had mostly gone up, so we had to throw out all the old data. I therefore wrote the Python script included in the source; I'd include it below but the posting robot complains about junk characters. The script will extract ISBN numbers from stdin (which was our tex file), look them up at Amazon, and give you the prices and weights. I use it track the prices of my (least) favorite books. Not one has got less expensive.
In our survey, the average book price was $152 (and average weight was 6.8 pounds): for boring and often incorrect, unphysical problems and explanations. It's no wonder so many people hate physics, and we have only ourselves to blame if we lose all our funding.
Every physicist should put their (good) textbooks at http://arxiv.org/, where they would be available, sans DRM, to everyone in the world. We are supported by the public; why should the public have to pay twice, the second time in the form of royalties?
I recently had words with one of the publishers reps that come around every so often (I assume they do for you as well). My issue was edition churn (e.g. Lewis & Loftus' Java text is in its third edition in ~3 years). I made it very clear that I didn't appreciate them squeezing my students for every cent and making me be the bad guy (by telling them they had to buy the book).
The rep did seem to take my tirade seriously. I don't know that it will do any good, but if we all put a little pressure on the publishers, it might help them find a slightly more student-friendly attitude. After all, the publishers do rely on course instructors to require their books--they can't alienate us too much.
Very enlightening. Particularly the third (this one).
I noticed that the stock xpdf that is installed by Ubuntu's repositories (Universe) is the regular one from foolabs.com, which "respects" the nocopy/noprint flags; however the discussion on the Debian mailinglists seems to indicate what appears to be a consensus for including a version with a flag option ("--ignoreperms" or similar); does anyone know if any of these patches have been integrated into the mainline Debian version? I couldn't find any information just by looking at the package's site; since Ubuntu is branched from debian-unstable I'm guessing that it's not been integrated.
IMO it should; integrating a "Are you sure you want to ignore settings?" patch seems totally in line with at least my understanding of the Debian philosophy.
A computer is like a pocket knife. It's a tool, which has many uses. It's not the responsibility of the maker of the tool to look over the user's shoulders. Powerful tools can by their nature be used for good and bad, in the same way that I can use a pocket knife to carve wood or stab someone. (Albeit perhaps ineffectually; maybe that analogy would have been better with an axe or nailgun.)
Going offtopic here for a moment: Some days I wish the people at the PLF would put out a distro. Call it "Useful Linux." Combine together all the tools that are prohibited or that you have to jump through obnoxious hoops in order to use in various parts of the world -- proprietary driver licenses, encryption, DVD playback, audio codecs, DRM removal/ignorance. The hell with the licenses, the hell with local laws, put it all in there, release it as a Live CD, hosted only from Free countries / on PirateBay-type BT trackers. I think it would just blow people away to use an OS that didn't have any artificial limitations on it out of the box, just for once; an OS created as it ought to be created in the absence of political meddling. Not so much as an actual distro -- I'm not suggesting that it be maintained -- more as just a statement, a one-off curiosity.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."