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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.
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.
...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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
sobaticles
Wasn't he a contemporary of Socrates? As I remember, he was known for taking a lot of time off from work.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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
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
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!
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.
The only one I'm aware of is FFES (Freehand Formula Entry System)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ffes/
Not opensource AFAICT is Infty:
http://www.inftyproject.org/en/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I presume you were an undergraduate somewhere and know the ways you are forced to buy new texts. Minor revisions marketed as new editions, rotating question sets, etc.
from the looks of his homepage url it looks like he is here in the uk. We don't seem to have anything like the issues with textboooks that you yanks do.
this idea of forcing students to buy lots of expensive textbooks seems like a US anomoly not a general thing accross the world.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I had to buy a signals & systems book (Oppenheim). I didn't want to pay $120 for a new book or slightly less for a used one, so I got an international edition off eBay for $20ish. It's actually pretty good quality. But the kicker is the list price, which the seller of my book covered with nail polish. I scratched it off to find "300 Rs." Currently, $1 USD = 45 Rs.
Som years ago I worked on a user experience research project for an eBook reader. These days I'm a college psych professor.
eBooks currently appeal to only a very small number of students. I think the reason is usability:
--eBook readers are a pain to read
--Reading lots of text on a computer screen is not easy on the eyes
--On either a reader or a laptop you're going to be limited by battery time, or tethered to a spot
--Books take a beating a lot more easily than electronics
--Books won't have tech support issues, they're unlikely to break in an unrecoverable way
--Books can be resold
--Books are more easily markable
--Books don't have to be booted up in order to quickly look something up
--Books are more accessible to a wider array of students
Now, there are certainly advantages to eBooks. Currently my publisher offers an eBook of my Intro Psych text for about half the price of the original, so the student will be better off going that route than buying new and reselling to the bookstore. An eBook reader or laptop is certainly easier to carry than a stack of 6 700 page books, too. But I think that overall, the eBook is just not a mature technology yet in terms of the comparability of its user experience with that of regular old books.
As for my classroom - I've been frustrated recently when one text was updated after only 21 months. Grrrr. But I leave a copy of each text on reserve at the library for student use.
Yes indeed, there're several!
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?
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."