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Don't Take Notes In the Bookstore
mikesd81 writes "The Harvard Crimson reports that the Harvard Coop asked Jarret A. Zafran to leave the store after writing down the prices of six books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial. The apparent new policy could be a response to Crimsonreading.org, an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers. The Coop claims the ISBN identification numbers in books are their intellectual property. Crimson Reading disagrees. 'We don't think the Coop owns copyright on this information that should be available to students,' said Tom D. Hadfield, co-creator of the site. The student paper reports that an unnamed intellectual property lawyer agreed with Crimson Reading's position."
well, at least he wasn't tasered.
Strange... we have our instructors post the ISBN numbers of course materials on "information pages" for our online courses, and most (90%+) put it on the syllabus, etc. for on-campus courses. Don't see what the big deal is...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Surely you have to demonstrate that some intellectual effort went into the production of the ISBN for it to come under IP law in the first place (regardless of "ownership"). Presumably the publisher was just allocated a bunch of ISBNs and they just happened to allocat one of them this one book? Shoot me down if you like. I'm not an expert.
an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers
So Harvard Coop is excluded from the list, and I doubt students will be rushing there in a hurry.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
So in effect, ISBN's are owned by no one except for the distributing and maintaining body.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
ISBNs are nobody's intellectual property apart from the ISO. It's an international standard described by ISO TC 46/SC 9.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
God forbid you mess with the media mafiosi. What I found funny was that some Chinese students were smuggling international editions in and selling them for $10-20 after they were done with them. These were books that were supposed to cost me $150. I also used to wait in front of the buyback tables and offer $5 or $10 more than the bookstores low low buyback price for the books (required for my classes) that they would later sell for five times as much. That really pissed them off, even though the employees were just students getting paid a flat hourly rate.
I used to have a really hard time believing they were worth that much until I got some bad assigned textbooks. Problem was that the bad textbooks had the same damn price.
So, now book sellers don't want you to do price comparisons? College textbooks are so ridiculously overpriced, its a tragedy. I've been lecturing at a community college for over three years now. One class I do is a non-credit pre-Chemistry class. Because its a prereq for General Chem. 1 and 2, we use the first three chapters of the textbook for that course. The $180 textbook. Many of my students aren't even planning on taking General Chem at my school or at all. But, if they want to be able to keep up with the homework, they have to get the book.
And its the same for all my classes. Books are $100 to $200 new, the bookstores almost never have used books, and if they do you know they bought them back from the previous owner for pennies on the dollar. I start each of my classes every semester by showing the students the "required text" and then explaining how they can get by with an older edition or with some internet research.
Lately students have been finding the wholesale-priced "international editions" online which saves them money without sacrificing quality. But, where do schools and publishers think students are getting all this money from?
I agree with RMS on the topic of the term "Intellectual Property".
It's a FUD term that opportunistic lawyers and unscrupulous corporations (the embarrassingly pathetic SCO) use to justify empty threats and pump-and-dump litigation.
Patents, copyrights, and trademarks mean something. "Intellectual Property" is the high-ranking corporate imbecile's buzz word of the year.
The book store has as little "ownership" of the ISBN as they do of the title of the book itself.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Coop members also get a profit share at the end of the year. And the bookstore part of the Coop is already associated with Barnes & Noble, as are 80% of college bookstores. (I don't think "owned" is the right phrase, I don't know how the relationship works.) But yeah, there are students on the Coop board who should probably be alerted to this so they can fight it.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I don't really understand what this is all about.
I mean, if you have to get the textbooks, they'll have to tell you which ones to get. This means that they are either going to tell you Author/Title/Edition or the ISBN. If you have either of these you can easily look up the other on the internet. And the *prices* can't possibly be protected by copyright.
Moreover, I find it completely normal and sensible to write down the prices of what you are going to get. Maybe you want to pay in cash and have to know how much you have to bring. I mean, what would you do if you walked into a shop, wrote down a price and someone told you that you're not allowed to do that?
I don't know what is going to happen if they are really going to enforce their totally ridiculous "no note taking in a book shop" policy, but I know what *I* would do in a similar situation:
1. Look up the ISBN on the internet
2. Find out where the book is cheapest, maybe both online and offline - they'd obviously out of that because 'note taking' is not allowed
3. Get the book there
4. Only get those books at the Coop which aren't sold anywhere else. Which I doubt are many.
Does this mean they owe the coop royalties on if they let other bookstores use the same ISBN numbers?
ISBNs on books are the IP of The US ISBN Agency, and since they have the sole authority in the U.S. to issue ISBNs, it's a bit of a stretch (read: LIE) for any other legal entity to claim that the ISBN printed on the book are their IP.
If you prefer, you can ask The National Information Standards Organization, which will tell you the for country X it's organization Y. For instance, Canadians will use their own agency.
The desire to destroy competition is alive and well. Let's hope this is one attempt which fails miserably.
ISBNs might be the publisher's IP (although they actually aren't), but they certainly aren't the STORE's.
In any case, the excerpt of the publisher's putative IP that is represented by an ISBN unquestionably comes under the "fair use" defense. First of all, it is a negligibly-sized component of the book, and more importantly, it is clearly being used for purposes of reviewing the book (i.e., expressing an opinion about the relationship of the book's content to its price).
It's also absurd for a store to eject people doing competitive research. To be sure, some businesses explicitly forbid picture-taking (on the argument that their "trade dress", as represented by the store's design overall, is protected intellectual property)--but preventing people recording prices and descriptions seems like it would fall afoul of various consumer protection laws, even if the restriction were explicitly posted and uniformly enforced (which it apparently is not).
Harvard "Co-Operative Society", we hardly knew ye. Next time, take a voice recorded and a concealed mic. That's faster than taking notes, anyway.
This has come up before and I believe a judge ruled that prices are facts, and facts cannot be copyrighted. That applies to the ISBN number as well.
Although that doesn't mean you cannot be asked to leave the store for doing it. It's their store and they can throw you out for anything they want. And the store is perfectly allowed to suffer for it.
...it is recirculated once the book goes out of print; many books have the same ISBN but only one in print book at a time can use it. One minor correction, from ISBN.org, I found: ISBN CAN NEVER BE REUSED: Once an ISBN is assigned to a title, it CANNOT BE REASSIGNED even if the title goes out of print. In addition to being an order fulfillment tool, the ISBN is a bibliographic element in cataloging. It is printed on catalog cards, in catalogs and entered in national and international databases. So it always has to be the same book, it's never 'recycled.'My work here is dung.
Store Clerk: Shall I price this up at $1.99? .99's are owned by Wallmart ..... We need a new price label gun.
Store Manager: $1.99 good idea, but all the
Store Clerk: what about $1.98?
Store Manager: Owned by Texaco...
Store Clerk: $2.01? that's an unusual price, no one will have..
Store Manager: BestBuy
Store Clerk: 2.02?
Store Manager: Circuit City
Store Clerk: Fine, what price should I put on it?
Store Manager: One and one sixth of a dollar and fourteen halves of a cent.
Store Clerk:
As we all known, college textbooks have been corrupt for a long, long time. It actually makes me think that we ought to move to a "pharmacy" model, where the book stores must be independent from the colleges, just as the dispensing of drugs is separate from the prescribing doctor to prevent this kind of corruption.
Of course, you couldn't do anything about private universities, but the government could implement this for public universities, and hopefully shame the private ones into going along.
If Harvard is going to these extremes such as this to prevent people from copying down a few numbers in the bookstore, you know they're corrupt to the core. Clearly they've long abandonded their mission of being a place of higher learning. Of course, the whole Ivy League's been running on reputation for a long time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I strongly suggest that you check out ISBNDB, which is an online database of ISBN numbers. You wouldn't have to go look up numbers in-person, thereby removing any possible blame from yourselves.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Coop attempted to challenge the ISBNDB, however....
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Of course the Coop was just making up something off the top of their head when they used the "ISBN number" pretext.
I really would be curious to hear a serious legal analysis by someone who knows, though.
My completely naive notion would be that you're on the retailer's property, and it's not totally obvious what things you're doing by right and what things you're doing by custom and by permission. Certainly you can't steal a book. Certainly you can't damage a book e.g. by tearing a page out of it.
Certainly you can open a book and flip through it even though the cumulative effect of dozens of shoppers doing this eventually causes the book to become shopworn. But is this actually by right, or is this just by custom? Quite possibly it merely a courtesy extended to me by the store.
Price information and easy price comparison help the consumer. Denying this information helps the retailer. How far does the law go in requiring the retailer to make things easy for consumers? There are such things as hired comparison-shoppers who are working for the competition. They are not bona fide customers and are not going to buy the items they are looking at. Is a store required to be nice to them?
Gas stations have such big conspicuous outdoor price signs that it must be required by law, but is that state or federal law?
In Massachusetts, shelf labels in supermarkets and drugstores are required to show a computed unit price (which is oddly useless because of creative variation in the unit used, but never mind). Until very recently Massachusetts required individual price labels on every item (but caved to years of open defiance Wal*Mart and other national chains). So Massachusetts has a certain amount of law that sorta-kinda says the consumer has some legal rights to easy price-shopping.
The Coop and the college bookstores of the world have a pretty tight lock on textbook shopping. It's not absolute, but it's certainly not a frictionless free market and every college town I've ever been in has had one very clearly dominant bookstore, and, usually, one also-ran which has some of the books you need, just coincidentally at the exact same prices as the dominant store.
Completely tangential footnote: one of my proud moments as a dad occurred in the nineties, in the days when I was still using dialup and most people didn't know what "dot-com" meant, and my kid was in college, and called me, distraught because the college bookstore was out of a textbook she needed for a course, and was estimating six weeks for restocking. I logged into Amazon--quite possibly using lynx as my browser--saw they had it, smiled my big Daddy grin and (mentally) pulled out my big Daddy wallet and had them overnight it to her. In this case, of course, I was paying more than the bookstore price (but the overnight shipping was, of course, only a fraction of the book's cost).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Intellectual property isn't a concept in the law in and of itself, the term is really more a way to spread nebulous FUD and also a convenience term to collectively speak about legal concepts that are separate but all deal with the notion that people can own ideas.
So what form of intellectual property exactly does the bookstore think the numbers fall under?/P>
They're not copyrighted. Even under modern, highly stretched definitions of creative works you can't copyright a number like that. What original expression of an idea does it represent? Not that someone wouldn't try it, people have even tried making claims as stupid as that the price of their merchandise is copyrighted.
They're not a trade secret. The numbers are printed right there on the book.
They're not a trademark. When someone sees "978-0-7356-1879-4" they don't think of this particular bookstore, which is good because that would make it really hard for other stores to sell the same book. Intel did try to trademark the number "486" and failed, which is why they started naming all their chips "Pentium" instead.
And, they're not patented. Even given the level of rubber-stamping the Patent Office does, I don't think "A system for designating a book with the number 978-0-7356-1879-4" would cut it. Maybe if you added "on the Internet" in there somewhere...
The laws regarding purchasing the international copy of a book (international copies of the same book which have different ISBN numbers and are technically not to allowed to be sold in US) are a bit murkey. But it appears that you can, indeed, get those books legally.
A blurb from a rather lengthy reply on Google Answers: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=295219
"The current state of US law is that international versions of textbooks that are lawfully manufactured under the authorization of the copyright holder can be legally imported by a party that has acquired them outside of the US, for subsequent resale within the US. While the copyright holder can require that their license holders (the international printers) do not themselves ship manufactured copies directly for public distribution in the US without prior consent, the copyright holder cannot prevent a party from purchasing lawfully manufactured copies outside the US, and importing them into the US for sale or otherwise disposal."
Check out http://firstandsecond.com/
For the opportunists amongst you, this does present an arbitrage opportunity to buy books abroad and resell them in US, though it is my understanding that companies like Amazon and EBAY have provisions against resale of such books.
Sure, the student went to the book store to find out what the ISBN's were. I have had to do this often, as the instructor was too lazy to include the ISBN or enough info to be certain of the ISBN within the syllabus. I was even referred to the campus book store without getting so much as a book title. Then I was presented with a basket of books to purchase based on the class that I was taking.
Obvious collusion between the faculty and the bookstore to drive revenue. Rather than fall prey to such a scheme I took digital photographs of the books in question and proceeded directly to amazon and some other academic book site to purchase my texts. In one case I had to resort to being behind an edition, which didn't hurt much, it was an art history text, rather than pay the exorbitant prices that were being asked at the campus store.
So, as adept as you were at potentially skewering the GP's argument... you ignore the potential reality of the situation. The schools are trying to drive revenue by creating an artificial monopoly.
These traditions are perpetuated by what is supposedly the best that mankind has to offer? Doesn't it seem a little.. infantile?
> What's next? They claim they own the page numbers too?
If they're claiming page numbers 386, 486, and 686, they'll have a big battle with Intel.
Max.
I, along with just about everyone I know at MIT, go to the Coop (Harvard/MIT Cooperative) at the start of every term, head over to the textbooks and copy down all the information and prices we need right in front of whoever is working there. I just did so two weeks ago, carrying a bag from Quantum Books (a bookstore next door with sometimes cheaper textbooks) too. It doesn't make any sense for them to care about getting the books somewhere else since it's a cooperative anyway. Something doesn't seem right here.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
well, at least he wasn't tasered.
The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now music downloaders were tasered, arrested and condemned a-la Judge Dredd.
A couple of years ago I was only angry at the U.S. Now I'm all freaked out.
'Tis but a flesh wound!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Caltech's bookstore will let you show proof of a cheaper price at several online retailers (amazon included) and they'll match that price. You might not want to purchase anything else at the crazy prices they have there, but at least they keep the textbooks competitive with online options.
@AlexSheive
I think someone is seriously angry here. Angry, as in: not having a full understanding of what's really going on at College Bookstores and making us out as Public Enemy Number One.
As the owner of a small, privately owned (as in by me) College Bookstore (annual gross sales around $550,000/year) There are a few things I would like to point out. Before I do, let me insert the following caveats:
1) The principles upon which I choose to run my store are not necessarily how all bookstores do so (let alone those in my category of "small" and "privately owned"). Still, my comments are probably a good a place as any to start forming an understanding of College Bookstore practices.
2) I do actually care about customer service. However, I may not necessarily define the student who walks into the store with the intent of buying all his/her books elsewhere as a customer.
3) I do understand that owning a business and having it be successful in the long run is as much about relationship building (with customers and the institutions we serve) as it is about economic viability. Successful businesses, which are not a monopoly or government sponsored in some way, usually understand this.
4) I would like to hope I understand (there are those that may disagree with me) that the College Textbook market is rapidly evolving, principally due to: 1)the internet 2)rising textbook prices 3)rising tuition costs and 4)the way students are learning.
Having prefaced my remarks, I have few things to say:
I am not a rich man (at least by my standards) and neither are most of the students who attend the College I service: My annual salary is in the low 50's, which I think is reasonable considering I am the owner. I work about 50 hours a week outside of Fall and Spring Buying season (where I work 70 hours per week).
I know textbooks are typically very expensive. Bookstore profit margins on textbooks typically range from 20 to 25%. So to the extent that we sell books does in some way make us "part of the problem." We do try to get our hands on as many books as we can, because they cost us less and we can sell them for less. If a book is being used again for a class and it's not moving into a new edition we'll usually pay the student 1/2 our selling price for the book. This is an industry standard practice, so I don't really know where the whole "pennies on the dollar thing comes from."
Maybe the disenchanted community college instructor is referring to scenarios where students are selling back books that aren't being used again. These books are sold to wholesalers, who then pay us what we paid the student for the book (typically 5 to 35% of the new value of the books, depending on a variety of factors) plus a 20% commission. These books then sit in a massive warehouse, until a store like ours calls them to buy the book and sell in in their store, where it gets sold again as a used book. Because publishers cannot, for the most part, do EULAs with their new books, they understandably hate this practice and try to (my opinion) push out new editions as fast as they can get away with.
It's also possible the student sold back the book at a wholesale price and then *after the students sold them* we get an order for the book to be used. We encourage faculty to submit orders early because it allows us to buy back more books at 1/2 sale value and it allows us to get more used copies, but like the saying goes: you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink....
Our store (like almost all others) sells books according to what the faculty tell us to sell and what kind of book it is (e.g., required, recommended or optional). This doesn't always mean the book actually gets used or is really needed for the class (as any sophomore or senior will tell you) but it is *what we were told to list the book as* by an instructor or department chair. We find the books that sell the best meet one of more of
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power