Slashdot Mirror
Expensive Books Inspire P2P Textbook Downloads
jyosim writes "A site called Textbook Torrents is among the many sites popping up offering free downloads of expensive textbooks using BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer networks. With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase." Having just completed graduate school, I can attest that quite a few books are in that more-than-$100 range, and that they're heavy besides. But the big-name textbook publishers are much less interested than I am in open textbooks, even if MIT has demonstrated that open courseware is feasible, and Stanford and other schools have put quite a bit of material on iTunes.
I always wondered how the P2P/Napster thing would have turned out if it had been given a better, more descriptive name like: Library of Alexandria
You are stealing from the pockets of the professors who change the text book every semester making your used book worthless.
The problem isn't just that they are expensive, but that the publishers are trying to bilk the students. They include CD-ROMs they know are useless as an excuse to charge higher prices and they come out with a new "edition" every year that changes the page numbers and exercise numbers so that students can't rely on used textbooks.
They got too greedy and pushed too far and that is what will actually give people the motivation to push back.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I always tried to buy used books or buy from another student. It's quite a scam really, several courses I never even opened the book and passed the class successfully. Books are heavy, and it was a pain having to carry a bag full of them. I wouldn't have minded if they would've allowed a solution to buy a license to an e-book for the semester. Some of my classmates went so far to buy a book, scan every page and return it for a full refund before the cut off date. What a hassle.
The scam of requiring a new textbook every three years with the page numbers being the biggest change almost makes the music industry look like nice people.
Just what we need, yet another 'industry' to harass us and call us names.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Text book to me seem unfairly maligned for having a hefty price tag. I suppose it depends on your exact experience, but say a book costs around $100 and that students spend around $400-$500 per semester. I know plenty of people who complain about that, and then I see them spending $50 a night "going out" with their friends, or buying dinner with a date for close to $100. A DVD costs around $20 and lasts a few hours. How long would it take to read a text book and learn everything it has to offer? Years in most cases. If you don't think that sounds like fun, why are you at a university studying? If you go to a good school that has you buy good texts, and not 'keep up' every year with whatever new edition of Intro to Calculus it out, you are making an investment.
After having to pay for a new algebra book (75$'s) because, apparently, algebra changed since last year and the teacher insisted I have the new book.
The majority of cost for me to go to a community college here in California is the books, and it is such a scam by the book companies, which also left me wondering "does the teacher get a kick back?"
Why would an algebra teacher insist on the latest book? Because his exercises are there so it makes it easy to correct? Why?
Who cares it's a rip off any way you look at it.
This is one example of information that should be free, or extremely cheap, at least when it comes to types of knowledge (math) that has not changed for centuries.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The big problem here is that the price of textbooks has increased at a far higher rate than inflation. Students are forced to buy whatever textbook their class uses, so the publisher can set whatever price they wish - the students still have to use the books. Essentially, the publishers are granted monopolies on books for specific groups of students.
To combat this, many students buy used books. Many school bookstores offer few or no new textbooks for some classes, because they make a lot of money buying textbooks back and reselling them for more money. Publishers claim this further drives up the price, because they don't get a cut of resales. This may be true, but they've created this situation by pricing new textbooks so much higher than what their market can reasonably afford.
What they are really talking about here with changing the problems is shutting down the used textbook market. If you can't use the book from last semester, the used book becomes nearly worthless.
"some books costing more than $100" What Utopia is that in? I was lucky to get a paper back book for $120.00.
I've benefited a lot from the GPL, but in the back of my mind I've always considered Richard Stallman as something of a crackpot.. A bit too odd..
But the more I think about it, the more he makes sense. He's talking about software, but imagine if other knowledge was as free as the source code. Imagine how *anyone* could learn and be productive without the barrier of money.
When I was in college, I had lots of classes where we needed multiple $100+ textbooks - more than the cost of the course! I had a class once (business law) where the professor wrote 3 of the five books we needed and charged $90 for each book (paperback) and he required all five books. As far as I saw, we never even used two of the books out of the five!
College textbooks are completely ridiculous - and the material is not changing enough to warrant the insanely high costs. So, I say - good for the students that pirate them.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
The worst are courses where the books are updated year-by-year so that the practice problems will be different (I've even seen cases where the same mistakes persist in edition after edition, despite the books being updated), which makes buying the book from another student impossible and sometimes even getting the book from the library impossible, if the library does not have the budget to replace undamaged books every year. It makes some of the RIAA tactics seem reasonable by comparison.
Palm trees and 8
Clearly most subjects don't dramatically change from year to year (intro physics, algebra, calc, history, etc...). Why do professors always want to use the most recent version? Is it only because they know everyone can get a copy? Wouldn't it be easier (and legal) to solve this problem by publishing a page-number alignment table so that ALL old versions could be used in the same class?
When I was in school I found my recall was highly photographic and associative. I assume this is present to different degrees in most people.
When I recalled something in a book I would recall where on the page it was and what was around it. I'd recall how far I had to flip into the book roughly before i'd have to turn individual pages. Even the weight of the binding was memorable.
I found I could learn more from books that had heavy covers, and glossy pages for easy turing, layots that were generous not compact with lots of color and visual reminders.
Thus to me a pdf file of a book on the screen or a Kindle are just viscerally anti-cognative even though the information might be identical.
The visceral nature of a book in not replicated on laser printed and bound paper. It just does not flip right for me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Our Introduction to Finance course in uni had a decent approach to the textbook issue. We had the option to purchase the text book, but were also given free access to a PDF version of the book online through our uni intranet, which was locked to prevent printing or saving.
Yes, having to view it online was slightly inconvenient, but for many cash strapped students it was less convenient than having to fork out wads of cash for the print version.
Before anyone says it - yes, I mean 'free' as in we didn't have to specifically pay to access it - of course there's fees and such forth that cover the cost.
The Mothership
First, I agree that many textbooks are outrageously expensive. But is their expense really "inspiring" (i.e. justifying) p2p downloading? Or is it just that textbooks are now widely available in downloadable form? My guess is that the rate of piracy would not significantly diminish even if the price was reduced by 50% or even 75%. See, for example, the many computer-related ebooks you can find on the torrent sites. Most of those books have a fairly reasonable retail price but they are subject to widespread piracy.
Has there been any study of P2P networks that shows an increasing rate of piracy a given piece of media vs its price? (Comparisons would be difficult because popularity also plays a role).
- Trevor -
[[self-construction]]: The autotherapeutic diary of a crazy geek's journey back to mental health
I agree that text books are becoming increasingly expensive. I currently take 2-3 classes every two months in addition to some certification studying. A number of my textbooks due include an electronic copy. However, as much as I like the electronic copy, I also like to physically flip through the pages. I guess until I find an e-book reader that I like, I'm stuck with hard copy.
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
No, really, why was the parent modded funny? It is true: textbook publishers routinely release "new editions" of books where only practice problems and page numbers have been changed, to try and force students to buy new books instead of used books. I've seen error that persist in edition after edition, or books where the problems themselves weren't even changed -- just the order and numbering of the problems. It is a disgrace, especially when professors go along with it (sometimes the professors are even collecting royalties from the books in question).
Palm trees and 8
And the scheme of revisions that only change the spelling errors and the problems/answers is deplorable. It's a shame that people supposedly in the business of education engage in such activities. More curious to me however, is the fact that educational institutions haven't banded together to write and share "open" textbooks.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
where are the answer keys?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Sad isn't it?
For 99% of the courses, 99.9% of the material will NOT change from year to year.
Yet the textbooks are re-released almost every year.
Now, the only downsides I see to having Free (as in Freedom) textbooks available in digital form are:
#1. The answers to the exercises WILL be available on-line. So? If the instructor cannot come up with his/her own exercises then s/he needs to find a new job.
#2. Printing on a laser printer is more expensive than in a print shop. But if students only print out the exercises, they save paper anyway.
Any others?
Perhaps this will drive the publishers to put them on electronic formats (DRM free please) just like napster drove music companies to do same.
If the average American moves every 7 years, it should be a relief to get rid of the dead tree library.... I had to get rid of so many books, especially old college texts, that I could not justify keeping (but wanted to) whereas an electronic format would have made it easy -- especially with eink readers rapidly advancing this year.
I hope this also makes a ridiculous market cheaper. Charge too much.... and know you'll lose too much marketshare to piracy.
How about publishing tables that merely list equivalent pages and exercises between versions -- would that be legal? It would allow students to use old versions of the books,
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I spend over 500 dollars on textbooks each semester, most of which I barely end up using. It's a real racket.
The worst, imo, are the ones that aren't heavy, and are still expensive. I had one in college, for Theory of Computation, that was $80 for a 200 page book. That's 40 cents a page! It was a pretty good textbook, but I was still glad that I was able to just borrow one from someone else for the semester.
You know, I feel bad for you, and I do think you are correct. Initially, more than anyone, the people who will feel the hit are the workers.
But seriously, if there is one thing that you should get for free after insane amounts of tuition, it should be the materials you need to attend those classes you already paid for.
Rip Rip Rip those books to PDF.
and the bastards won't even give me an electronic copy. Hell, I'd pay more for my calc text if there was an digital copy.
Why(besides the typical bullshit reasons)can I not get a nice electronic copy of my textbooks when I buy them? Only one book ever did that and it was my stupid java book.
You mad
Well don't quit your... oh wait...
"With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase."
It's not my intention to troll, but this certainly won't help the cost aspect of it. College textbooks are different from music CDs in their profit margin. They differ at least in the cost of production and the frequency of purchase. There has to be some justifiable reason for professors to write these books -- they need compensation for their time.
I'm not saying that publishers are not abusive in this respect. I'd much rather see government-sponsored textbooks (textbook grants) or independent publishing.
There needs to be a solution to this problem, and I'm quite sure that this will not have the desired long-term effect.
I prefer by far to read from a regular book, it feels a lot more natural and is easier on my eyes.
It's worth to spend those extra $30 on the paper.
And don't buy the book your teacher recommends, unless it has a lot of great reviews at Amazon. You go to school to learn, a different book(and a book more suited for your learning style) is often way better. You don't have to rely on your teacher to learn something.
I very very very rarely buy textbooks. The only time I will buy them is if I plan to keep them for my own personal library (I did this for books on biologically inspired algorithms, for example, as it is a subject I am interested in). Very rarely do any classes seriously require a book. Even if your homework is in the book, your university library will almost certainly have a copy. Usually they also have a copy machine or two right around the counter. Use your head.
I'm a junior in college right now, and last semester my tab for books ran right around $900 for 18 units. Fortunately I was able to buy most of them at half the cost from other students online, but my physics textbook was cycled to the '12th edition' and basically made me unable to submit problem sets from the 11th; long story short I wound up having to shell out $180 for the 12th edition book since no one else had their hands on it.
It's been a number of years since I worked as an adjunct professor, but even then textbooks were outrageously expensive. I didn't even want to specify textbooks for my classes, but the school administration would always force me to pick one to use for the course. The reason was that the school made money from every textbook sold. It killed me to force struggling students to purchase expensive textbooks that they would hardly use, but I didn't have much choice. In a way it was as if the school was hiding part of their tuition within the book costs.
Proverbs 21:19
Posting as AC.
I am a physics postdoc, and I found the use for pirated books. I downloaded a torrent of 4+ GB of physics (and other sciences) books (pdfs, djvus), photocopied, scanned and OCRed by our russian friends. Add papers and complete (legal!) books from springerlink, thanks to the university subscription. Fire up you favorite desktop search engine (google desktop search, beagle, tracker, strigi, etc...) and you have a treasure trove of information at your disposal. You can complement that with the google books scans of physics texts, specially dover books :)
Even my boss (who has published a book) likes the idea.
Summer repeat.
I'm sorry but I can't sit and watch liberals destroy themselves in the pursuit of free works.
Its one thing that the likes of any number of political musicians might suddenly find themselves without a fat paycheck once CD sales approach zero, its quite another when the very academic backbone on the country is assaulted.
It takes an enormous amount of work to make a good academic text. You can't just learn something like physics by skimming a few blog quotes, or get a real sense of any field, for that matter, by reading books. Is it unfortunate that they cost a lot? Yes, it is. But books have always been historically valuable things and the bulk of that value has been in the content.
I've read MIT Open Courseware and a lot of it actually is not that deep. A few syllabi and class notes and homework assignments is not the same as the book the class refers to!
Textbook authors deserve to be paid. If you have a society where authors do not get paid, you basically wipe out the entire academic basis of learning in the USA, and with it, our country. People's quests for knowledge about the world will not go away when you get rid of books, and, instead of books, they will have their heads filled with muddy, wrong and incorrect web sites all measured more by how many clicks they get from adsense than any real academic measure of the value of the work.
Indeed, there's a lot of that already.
But hey, if all of these professors want to work for free... they are more than welcome to it, but I guarantee them this - preachers -never- work for free, and, if people want to screw over universities because they don't want to pay their authors, then, we'll wind up reverting back to a medieval society.
This is my sig.
returned to college after 15 years out and was glad to find that half.com, and I am sure there are others, offers textbooks at often more than half the price of books in the bookstore. Was this not an option for the submitter? missing something? but I am surprised to know that books have only begun to appear on p2p.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
is that frequently the books aren't even any good and are full of factual errors. I'm not even talking high level, easy to mix up stuff here.
I had one textbook explain how javascript was invented by Sun and runs in the JVM just like Java.
I had yet another textbook explain how scripting languages like perl, php, and javascript have very little functionality and primarily work by executing binaries on the computer and using the output from them (like a ksh, csh, bash, etc script). That's a big "hell no" in all 3 cases and in the case of JavaScript, is not even an option in its most common use.
Those are just the errors I remember off the top of my head. I go through each of my textbooks and usually find 3-5 errors like those in each book without even having to look very hard or research any of the information given.
Publishers are selling these to people who may not know any better for $50-$75 each, with very basic information being totally incorrect. And then, even worse imo, the schools are telling students they have to buy them and then are sending students out into the real world after having been "taught" using such low quality learning materials.
I bought most of my books on eBay from international students (I'm in the US). I rarely spent more than $150 per semester until my last semester, which was heavy on liberal arts classes--I paid almost $400 for books that semester! A Physics-major friend of mine had a scholarship which paid for all of his books, which he got new all of the time: his were upwards of $800 per semester, and one semester, he topped $1,000.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
My first anatomy atlas (4 books in total) cost 460$. That was 15 years ago.
"He said that if the problem worsens, publishers may have to take other steps to prevent piracy, such as releasing a new version of most textbooks every semester. The versions could include slight modifications that could be changed easilyâ"such as altering the numbers in math problems."
What for? All this is going to do is destroy the used book market. The resale of used books is the only way that we can recoup some of our losses. With more expensive books, more people will download.
The **AAs tried this with their DRM. Guess what? Devaluing your products does not expand you consumer base.
The less attention the treeware / ebook / whatever you want to call it scene gets, the better.
I could easily live without music and movies, but... books? I'd rather commit suicide.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Are there no cooperative online text books by now? Surely, for at least the common courses, any given prof. could write a section of a chapter. Have some small group of volunteers that handles the outline, divide up the work into chapters and sections, and get folks to write sections. Have another group edit. Heck, charge schools who don't contribute any staff time $100 per 'book' per class for access, and use that money to hire out the illustrations.
Textbooks made good sense, before the Internet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Don't think so. The so-called "little guys" don't charge 100$+ for their books (or, if they do, they usually deserve being one of those).
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
If you guys start stealing text books too just keep in mind that its the lthe little guys who will suffer like the unions who man the presses and the shmoos like me who are paid to put the book together.
Wow. Robots have actually unionized?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm sorry, I know your job depends on the publishers being able to rip us off, but most of us don't have jobs. I've been able to land decent summer jobs because of my skills and major, but the majority of my friends are either unemployed or will not make enough money this summer to completely cover the cost of their books. This expense is added to the price of tuition, which some of my friends can barely afford. If the new American dream is to go to college, get a degree, and make lots of money, these publishers are pushing more and more people out of that dream.
I'm not exaggerating, by the way. A lot of people have trouble coming up with the money for textbooks. A single $100+ book would be manageable, but when it is a matter of 6 or 7 such books every few months, it becomes a problem. It flies in the face of copyright law (pre-DMCA), but I can see why people would turn to torrents to get their textbooks.
Palm trees and 8
America gets a bad enough rap with the state of our education system today. Don't make it worse by leaving our students behind the rest of the world! Where would we be if our students didn't understand the latest developments in trigonometry or first-semester calculus? The changes in Newtonian physics from year to year alone are enough to keep a team of textbook writers employed around the clock.
Breakfast served all day!
There is no justification for the price of textbooks, especially since I tend to find out that I never truly need them for the courses I take. I'm a biology major finishing up my degree, and I generally buy textbooks as a safety net just in case I need to drive a point home if I'm not quite getting it. The thing is, I end up buying a book I never have to use, $200 down the drain. Just by opening the textbook from its package, the value depreciates 60-80%--that is fucking unbelievable!
I found many books for courses on bittorrent and grabbed them, therefore textbooks have been free for me starting from the beginning of this year. I've actually used one book for one course, but that doesn't make up for the thousands of dollars practically robbed from me. Now publishers are upset that people are using technology to cut corners. It's not like they don't already have an advantage: physical textbooks are superior to anything I have to read on a computer, but I can't justify wasting (my parents') money on textbooks I simply don't use. It's not like sources aren't recycled among competing texts, and the damn information is incredibly easily to acquire on the internet for free and legitimately.
It's not impossible to make affordable texts. They weren't impossible in the days of our older professors who enjoy reminding us about the good ol' days of textbook affordability. How am I supposed to boycott companies without committing some kind of crime, Libertarians?
As an engineering student I realized right away the idiotic amount of money I could end up dropping on text books. I've found buying paperback international editions from websites such as abebooks.com is extremely cost effective. I can buy a 170 dollar book for 11 bucks plus 15 dollars shipping. Every semester these books change, rendering my purchases worthless. If I can do without a book, I'll do without it. If I can't, I'll buy from India. I can't believe how many peple just sit around and pay these obscene prices.
I felt lucky when I got a book that actually weighed more than a few ounces.
$150 for a book 5"x7" and 1/3" thick is something to complain about.
Before the "NET Book Agreement" broke down you could get Academic books at reasonable prices in the UK. Since then the prices have gone through the roof for most book except crap Biography books of Z-List celebs!!!!
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
You don't talk about Book Club
We know about the http://www.opentextbook.org/ initiative. I can't see anything on their site about how they validate the textbooks. It's easy enough with books that are published by existing publishers, but what if you want to write an open textbook?
One of the things that makes a textbook an acceptable reference in research is that it is peer-reviewed. That peer-review has the benefit of checking for errors as well as giving some assurance that the content is correct. I'd hate to buy a maths book that messed up how to do a derivative.
We need the peer-review if these books are ever going to be taken seriously. This is a not a radical idea. It is, in many ways, a return to the past when academic ideas where exchanged freely.
What I would suggest is that those of us with Ph.D.'s in our fields set up some sort of agreement to review each other's "open source" texts under a few conditions (negotiable, of course).
One of those should be that if I'm going to review the textbook for free that the textbook itself should be available in a usable form for free or nearly free Download the pdf for free or for some very small amount to help offset hosting costs. There is no reason an electronic copy of a textbook should cost $90.
A second condition, courtesy, would be to mention the reviewers.
A third would be to include some blurb in the text about the whole open textbook thing and why the textbook was published at so little cost, etc. In other words, spread the word.
Printing costs money, and that is understandable. Lulu, and other services, offer on-demand printing. The OWASP project offer their materials via Lulu at cost, and free for electronic download.
I know there are many Slashdot readers who have Ph.D.'s in their fields. I also know that there are many who will be offended by my mentioning the Ph.D. or other doctoral degree as a qualification, but if we want these texts to be taken seriously in universities, then they need to follow the criteria that universities use when assessing textbooks. Sorry. If it is going to be taken seriously, then at least the "lead" author needs to have the degree or be someone very, very famous in the field (such as Bruce Schneier).
I'm going to contact the Open Textbook people, but I'd like to see who here in the Slashdot community would be willing to put in some time to see something like this work. Here's a chance to fight back in a way that is legal, ethical, and just may work.
There are plenty of people on Slashdot who are more than adequately qualified to write university-grade textbooks on various subjects.
I'm sure some people are going to flame me for this. It was not my intent to offend anyone. I am an adjunct professor, so I am somewhat familiar with how textbooks are evaluated and selected.
I think we can make a difference here, just like the OSS community have made a difference in software.
I find it amusing that the CAPTCHA for this post is "computes".
My freshmen year I got reamed pretty bad, but I wised up quickly. Generally buying international editions on the cheap (I have an int'l algorithms textbook right next to me that I still use years later), buying from Amazon and Half, and most importantly, buying directly from students. The only time I would go into the bookstore was to write down what books I needed and their ISBN. I always laughed at their prices.
I also generally avoided buying really expensive textbooks until I absolutely needed them, and even then, returned them within a day or two of buying them or just going to the library and sitting there for a few hours working on problems.
I saved a ton of money, probably about a $1000 from sophomore to senior year. I would have saved more if a bunch of my textbooks hadn't gotten destroyed when our house's roof leaked and all the water dripped right onto my books... My landlord cut me a $100 check for probably $250 worth of resellable books.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
the single most significant barrier to self success is a lack of money. You have much to learn, youngster.
Sorry, dude, but I have little more respect for the textbook industry than I do for the RIAA. What respect the textbook industry gains in actually being useful and requiring lots of work and quality, they quickly lose due to their policies of exorbitantly-overpriced books and pushing new editions which are changed just enough to make old editions obsolete. Add in the fact that the textbook manufacturers have a pseudo-monopoly (do you know any professors who give students their choice in textbooks from any available? me neither).
So the bottom line is that the difference between the RIAA and the textbook industry is that I can choose not to listen to the RIAA's crap. I can't choose not to use textbooks from publishers I don't like.
I went through the same process. But none of my instructors every understood the futility of grading homework when I'm paying for the opportunity to attend the class to learn the material.
They should not be wasting their time going over the assignments to see if I'm following the material. That should be my job. They should be spending that time making themselves available for questions I might have on the material.
Sketch it out on a timeline and you'll understand. By the time you know you made a mistake in the traditional process, most of the week will be over and MORE time will be wasted. And you'll end up having to go over material from Monday when you're on Wednesday instead of focusing on the material you just learned on Tuesday (which won't be addressed until Friday then).
I'm going to be checking P2P from now on. I have never got to use a previous edition in any class yet. From day one of undergrad to now after graduation and taking classes for grad school padding I have NEVER sold a single book I got for class. (And I majored in biochemistry, I don't think I had a single book cost less than $120 aside from mandatory english lit.) They always used a newer edition the next semester. EVERY SINGLE CLASS. Talk about a waste of money. Why the crap aren't the books included in the cost of tuition??
Hmm changing editions every semester instead of once per year, three-four editions per year. Sounds like some publishers are really not understanding the nature of their problem. They have a vastly smaller market than the movie and music industries. Pushing out that many editions - with the coreespondingly smaller print runs screwing over their diminishing economies of scale... Now factor in ever increasing distribution (fuel) costs. I predict profitable times for the first textbook publishing house to come up with a better way of handling the matter.
If the publishing houses will not come up with a better approach, then how long before some schools without textbook authors on faculty start digging up old public domain texts for basic math, langauges, etc (the stuff that really is as complete now as it was in the 1800s)?
Perhaps, the publishers need to take a hard look at their actual profit per dead tree copy and see what they would have to sell their texts for to make the same amount of profit if the replaced their entire distribution and production network (printing presses, warehouses, trucks, etc) with an authentication server and PDFs of their texts. If can drop their price far enough (say under $15 per copy), how much trouble would piracy be then?
For that matter, let the school handle it directly -eliminate the entire individual sale and just tack the price of the license(yes license!) for the text into the tuition charge for the class. Remove the point of weakness the pirates have attacked (the separate purchase of the textbook). Of course, if the publishers insist on a very high price for their text, they will find less folks taking the class that requires it...
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
I'd love to have a digital copy of University Physics by Young & Freedman, for the simple reason that the book is a pain to carry around with its 1500 larger than A4 pages. In fact, these digital copies exist and can be obtained from the publisher's website for free - if your lecturer is aware of the service and has registered with the publisher to make this available. Well, mine haven't. I'll be torrenting, no doubt.
"Bi-la Kaifa"
Textbook torrents are specifically for the purpose of education!
Title 17 of the United States Code
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use40
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
Yarrgh! Victory in sites, Captain. Yo ho ho!
Once this is easily demonstrated, music will be as easily demonstrated next. Knowledge Is Power!
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
I went to take a look and see if there was anything interesting and the site has already gotten a cease and desist from Pearson Education.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
So fucking what?
as others have shown, core knowledge does not change from year to year.
If it does, it's not knowledge, it's fad.
X^3+1
quick, first derivative; OK, now integrate it... tell me, has that changed in the last century or two?
(I spent more time looking for "^" than I took to figure it out... as anyone should).
The one thing I will fault this post with is a lack of link to the site... or maybe I'm too drunk to find it.
(don't drink and derive)
Oh wait, there it is... all math... ever buy a psych textbook?
I did, 20 years ago, it was $80 then... god fuck it up the ass, I don't wanna know what it is now.
Even with open alternatives, especially with free alternatives, It has been realized for two to three decades (if not most likely longer) that college texts were bullshit prophet (sic) centers.
If someone has anything to hide in "higher education", more likely than not, they are doing something against any form of education, and are more aimed at indoctrination, and probably don't even recognize it.
Schools make a lot of money off textbooks.
Some college bookstores offer used books, but they still make a lot of money there.
Many professors get a kickback of some sort. (Probably the same ones who complain about the ethics of plagiarism.)
Some profs are the author of the text. (With a good prof, it's a good thing. With a bad prof - ethics issues.)
Some profs require you to buy a huge bundle of printed papers for a 3-ring binder. (No one seems to question the ethics of that.)
Most colleges have the required textbooks on reserve in the library. Seems to be a law. (Of course the school won't tell you that.)
Keep an eye on student bulletin boards. The best price is usually student to student. I got my calculus text that way.
Network with the students a year ahead of you. You can learn about which profs to avoid. What the profs are looking for. Learn who is getting the grades. See if you can get his/her texts and or notes. Hang out with people in the same department, but keep your circle big. Some classes are required for multiple majors. (You might meet a cute student that way.)
One of my high school teachers said that in his day, the kids all had to buy textbooks. He said they always wanted the most used ones for two reasons: cheaper and had more/better notes in the margins.
I used to watch what books were required, then check with a hole-in-the-wall bookstore I knew. They bought used textbooks and sold them for a good price.
When I took General Psych (required class), I lucked out. One roommate loaned me his. I didn't even have to buy it.
Some PDF readers can save or print a locked file.
Some books ware worth keeping.
Tricks of the Trade:...
When returning books: Find the UPC of the "New" edition, slap it on your old edition and return it. Do it during the highest rush when the checkers in are just trying to get through everyone. I think I would net around $100 a semester buying $5 books and returning them for $30. Screw you book store.
This "Trade" is very old, it is called stealing.
Yes, textbook authors deserve to be paid for their well organized and written books. A book only needs to be written once and many copies can be made to educate many.
However, we have twenty different books covering a single topic. The rapid change of textbook versions shortens the lifespan of textbooks, increases its rate of depreciation.
This is analogous to getting an RRODing Xbox 360 instead of a PS3. (no flames intended)
I currently work for the college division of a major book publisher, and I can attest to the validity of this claim. There are a plethora of titles that are "pick-ups" from the last edition... This means that as little as possible is changed, but just enough to coerce instructors/students to buy the new addition.
Unfortunately, they constantly look for new ways to charge the students - additional web "content" that must be paid for, etc.
I apologize to everyone who is currently a college student, as I was not so long ago. I had no choice but to accept this job working for the Dark Side.
I live in Alexandria. The public libraries here blow. You wouldn't get anyone in the area to use the software. And since the libraries here are so bad, they wouldn't know that there is another Alexandria that was meant!
While I understand your point, I would assert that people already had the motivation (college students are notoriously poor and cheap) and it was the change in technology coupled with different societal norms. I mean, honestly, you think this wouldn't have occurred even if the prices were say, half of what they are? Or, that it wouldn't have occurred thirty years ago if there were an easier way than photocopying the pages?
The technology made it easy, and society is increasingly making it acceptable (regardless of your personal opinion on the morality) so I find the idea that the publisher's greed is the culprit to a be dubious justification at best.
The big textbook manufacturers aren't interested in open textbooks, but some of them are starting to participate in things like this:
http://www.freeloadpress.com/index.aspx
Textbooks that are free as in beer, if not free as in speech. (With ads.)
Well if you make your bread and butter off an industry that thrives off of ripping off poor college students maybe it's time to look for another job. If the prices were so ridiculous maybe your overloads wouldn't get ripped off.
My eldest son is in his final year of sports science/exercise rehabilitation. Books including lab books tally more than $1100/semester. That's almost a quarter of the tuition load. It's insane.
A hardback SF novel is sometimes worth more to me than the Paperback edition because of the physical qualities. It's nicer to read black text on white paper than it is to read black text on grey paper. It's nice to have a binding that doesn't break, or bend. The tactile qualities of the book is still worth paying for, sometimes. A physical copy of the book is easier on the eyes, and doesn't take up screen space.
However, in my experience, most college textbooks are not printed with quality bindings. Signatures may be printed upside down, in the wrong order, or omitted entirely. The corners of the covers wear away, exposing the cheap cardboard within.
Do the publishers do this to reduce resale value?
You're handing out/falling for the same mahooah that the RIAA/MPAA crowd have been pushing for years. The percentage of book revenues that goes to folks who physically create the books is paltry indeed. If you want to look at who is endangering your job, look to the big publishers who are increasingly moving their production to China and friends, just like every other large corporation.
Me? I'm buying my own HP 8100's, my own heavy duty binder and laminator, my own trimmer, etc. and plan to shift all of my production except for large posters and some letterpress inhouse within two years, at most. And since I won't be giving so much of my money to jobbers, I'll be all the better positioned to A.) do short runs at much lower capital investment, B.) shift to tree-free paper and other resources the large, commodity printers don't want to be bothered with, C.) produce books with unusual formats, ink, etc.
In an age of print-on-demand and ever more standardized products from the ever more consolidated megapublishers, it's more important than ever to pay attention to these things. Their stuff may be getting more and more plasticized. My stuff will be getting less and less so. And from the feedback I'm getting so far, customers love this kind of customization and attention to detail, including people in the educational market. I've been speaking to some schools who are quite interested in having some input in what they use without having to pay or charge their students an arm and a leg.
Oh, and fwiw, I think that you mean "shmoes". Unless, that is, you're a gelatinous white blog that without limbs that can't speak.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I've just finished my first year at university here in Ireland, and none of the twelve courses I've done actually required me to buy a textbook. Most of the lecturers provided outline notes in PDF, varying in quality. Even where there were no notes, there was no textbook either: it was then down to me and my note-taking. We were also advised to read some books that the lecturer knew were in the Library, but not one course followed a published textbook.
I have already downloaded some textbooks e.g. on Calculus, but t.b.h. between the lectures, notes, and the Library, I'm facing an information overload already, and am struggling to translate that in to knowledge. Unlike a previous poster, I don't have a photographic memory, and remembering detailed procedures is a problem. (We had only a couple of lectures on Differential Equations, then were expected to solve them under exam conditions... not gonna happen, no matter how many textbooks I had, but there was thankfully enough other Calculus in my head to let me pass that course.)
(this is not a
Too bad that only happens 1 time in 10 for the textbooks I used. Funny thing was, the ones that were crap were just as expensive and just as required. Too many of them were a regurgitation of the same of garbage as the last edition. About the only thing you could count on were the typos and the figures that didn't match up to the text. Heaven help you if a prof was actually in the process of writing a book.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Let's increase the price of our books to compensate!
What I and a few of my friends used to do in college was get the international version. Many times, instead of being color, it was all black and white. Some times there was absolutely no difference. In the international versions there are so many options: no CDs, no additional "notes", no Current Events (read: <5 years) articles, PDF versions, Problems & Answers only, no "study material", soft/hard covers, no color, etc. Whatever combination of the product you could think of was out there. Compared to here, where you are lucky to find soft covers, used, or CD less options. The options here suck along with their prices. A bundle is barely 10% less than the sum of its parts!
We had a speaker come in once representing the publisher of our class's book (yeah, either brave, or an idiot). We discussed the above, and the response: "It isn't cost effective to print B&W options here." or "The market there has a lower price tolerance." WTF, BS!
I asked him if there will ever be electronic versions (2003).
Response: "Oh we are providing ebooks next semester."
Me: "How much will it cost?"
Res: "Well we haven't figured out the market feasibility or the exact price, but considering you spend about $120 for this book, and sell it back for about $50, we will probably charge about $120-$50 = $70 dollars. Plus or minus depending on demand and if we want it to supplement our core business. And the ebook of course expires in one semester."
That's when we realized that the publishing industry really was that dumb.
Oh, btw, my friend skipped the soft cover, color US version of the $120 text book and got the international b&w hard cover for $50!!! This price included shipping over there costs, currency exchange costs, merchant markup, and the very expensive, shipping over here costs. He ended up selling the used book for ~$45 on eBay. Needless to say, by the 3rd year, he had a small business ordering books for classmates, he barely charged anything, but made enough to cover the cost of one or two of his classes' textbooks!!
My professor almost lost his head when we told him how much we paid (over $60) for the textbook he wrote. He was getting something like $5 for each.
Back in the day, expensive texts made sense. Why? Because the publisher received a typed manuscript with equations, etc *written* in. They then had to take that, reformat, etc, etc, etc and finally set the machines up and print the thing. A very time intensive expensive process.
That being said, the world has changed. What publishers get today is pretty much a finished work. And because we've entered the wonderful world of computers, they just need to input the file and push the start button. It's now a considerable cheaper process. But, yet the price of texts has increases very much disproportionally.
What I find deplorable, is that old texts like Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis (1976) costs $185 (hardcover) and $90 (softcover). Then there's Dudley's Elementary Number Theory (1978) which cost ~$120 when I bought it a couple years ago and Nering's Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory (amazon says 1976 but my copy says 1970) which costs $145. All three being some of the best books in there respective fields. But, the cost is prohibitive and quite frankly nonsensical. There's exactly zero reason why they should be so expensive when it is clear that they have since recouped the cost long ago.
I gotta say that if the publishers get significantly hurt because of downloading, they've done it to themselves. I won't be shedding any tears.
I had one "book" that cost $80 and wasn't even bound. It was just a shrink-wrapped stack of pages with holes punched in the pages so i could put it in a binder. I still have it because the bookstore wouldn't buy it back. Pretty good deal from the publisher's perspective. That three-ring binder looks great on my book shelf.
In high school (early 1990s), I had a calculus teacher who was _required_ by the school system to count homework as part of the grade. So, he had a simple formula:
And, if you had at least an 80% on homework, he'd drop your lowest test score when computing your test average ... which I vaguely remember also affecting your eligibility for the homework score
Now, part of this was because of a teacher's union rule that teachers wouldn't take homework home to grade -- so he made sure he got to drop large amounts of homework to grade. And yet, even with that, some people still failed his class, because they were too lazy to even try.
He tried getting out of teaching the 'lab 99' classes (pre-pre-algebra, for those students who weren't expected to make it to geometry before they graduated), but our new principal said he wasn't qualified to teach calculus, and took away all of his higher level math classes, so he walked the year after I graduated.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This article ispired me to look through Project Gutenberg for old Science and Math books.
This Calculus book looks decent.
Here's an Algebra book, but it doesn't look very good.
I also note that Chemistry has changed much in the last 100 years since the advent of quantum mechanics. I also can't seem to find any decent physics books on Project Gutenberg.
The US military has some nice textbooks online. I don't know how they got there though, they don't seem official.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Write a letter to the publisher of the textbook saying you are a professor considering use of their fine book in your class and request a copy. This is how professors get their copies. I've always thought that this was quite unjust.
Have you heard of LuLu.com? An A4 Color, Perfect Bound (8.264" x 11.694") 300 page book costs $49.53 when you print them one at a time with no bulk discount. About half of that $100 number people keep throwing around, and that's pretty close to the most you'll be spending on a book there. Download, print, and save $50.
Personally, I like searchable computer formats myself. I don't have magic memory powers ;-) So assuming it isn't a pdf full of scanned images of text, I'd be more inclined to use the "free" version even if it too were $100.
Why was this marked troll? Clearly the publishers are ripping people off, but he's not trolling. They have no problem ripping off their customers, what makes you think they won't do it to their employees?
This won't last too long, you can't sell a .pdf for beer money in the middle of the semester... I mean the END of the semester.
To Amazon's credit, there seem to be some folks there who understand the limitations and are working to fix them. If they can handle the DRM issue and make some major tech changes I'd love to see this.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I don't know what you studied in college, but for my chemistry degree, I had only a few books that were less than $100. Expensive books were the norm. In my last semester I bought 4 books which altogether cost a little over $600 new.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
I'm all for paying the authors for their time and effort and insight into a subject. The problem is, how much are the authors actually getting?
We're trying to get a small book published for our physics classes here. No big deal, its like 100 pages, and more of a workbook type thing to supplement class and the laboratories, so it need not be specially bound or anything. So our options for printing?
(1) university bookstore = make pathetic photocopies, sell it for 20000% what it cost to make the copies; they keep all profit, the authors and dept get nothing (university policy)
(2) real publishers = pay $50 in printing fees, $20 contract fee, this fee, that fee, and let them negotiate with our bookstore for appropriate shipping fees - no one even bothered asked what type of book it was, what we were looking for in terms of royalties, they just expected us to meet all of their demands. book will easily be at least $50-100 for students, which is unacceptable.
We sought independent local publishing, that would have cost $5-10 for a bound color copy (including shipping), and it seemed like a great deal. Only to be told by the university and bookstore we weren't allowed to. Why? I still don't know; the people that were supposed to "get back to you with some options" never called us, and have been avoiding our messages and phone calls for a couple months now. Probably because they know unless we break regulations, we don't have any other choice but to go through them.
From what I've seen, most (if not all) of the price goes to publishers and your Neighborhood Evil Bookseller, NOT the authors. Prices need to come down. Publishers don't do creative work and I don't think deserve anywhere near what they're making.
Until then, we've put our book up on the class website as a free PDF download for students, both to spite the book publishers/sellers, and as a service to our students whom we know can't afford such high prices. ... if any of you have published successfully and cheaply, how did you do it? It's a mess here. Maybe its just my university?
As someone who works in publishing, I have the following comments:
1. Don't steal someone else's copyright. Just don't. I know it doesn't sound like much, but the way I see it, an author's book, for whatever reason they choose to write it, is their intellectual heart.
2. I realize that textbooks are expensive, but so are the materials, the labor, the permissions costs, the manufacture. Despite what the general public thinks, we're not trying to be unfair or bilk the unsuspecting students. It's what it costs and we need to make a profit like every other company out there. Students spend thousands of dollars on expensive clothes, vacations, ipods, iphones, and all those things they do instead of going to class. And actually, while we're on the subject of price, can we talk about the skyrocketing cost of education?!? Why the rage is focused on textbooks instead of how much large universities charge for housing, for food, for tuition... well, it is very interesting.
3. So can authors and publishers get rich off selling textbooks? Absolutely. But for every book that sells a million copies, there are dozens that fail. As publishers, we have to pour a huge amount of money into each new project and hope that it works - that we've estimated the market size correctly, that we have a good product. And as much as we hate to admit it, we fail a lot of the time. And then all that money is lost.
4. The publishing model is growing outdated, but until you can get your professors to choose books that are online only, or to embrace the digital age, we've hit a wall. Most won't even consider a book that they can't flip through. We already offer online only books at a fraction of the cost, and even in print at many different price points, all of which are designed to offer choices and flexibility - and cost savings. That the prof chooses not to take advantage of it is their choice.
5. The book adoption system is flawed because the professors choose the text and the students pay for it. The professors get free supplements, free desk copies, free support. If you want to lower the price of textbooks, tell your professors that you don't need the free stuff that comes with it. You don't want the CD, or the study guide, and your professor should stop being lazy and make their own power points so I don't have to hire someone to do it, someone to accuracy check it, someone to produce it, and someone to post it online. Tell them to write their own instructor's manual, and their own test bank problems with which to fail you.
6. I know a lot of people think that professors will donate their time and energy to produce books that are free of charge. And some profs might. It also probably varies by discipline. But for the great majority, professors are like everyone else. They're worried about getting tenure, about establishing a good academic reputation, about paying their mortgage and sending their kids to college. There's a trade off for every project they undertake, and usually, with books, the motivation is monetary. Altruism is not terribly high on most people's priority lists, I'm sorry to say.
I'm just so trigger happy itching to see the legal court cases that smash the publishers of frequently changing textbook editions. If they refuse to sell older editions, there is a legitimate argumentative claim that they have abandoned the intellectual property claims of those older editions. If they are not actively trying to make a profit on older textbook editions, then you couldn't ask for a better caricature of a Scrooge to burn in effigy.
Textbook publishers are going to take some crushing public relations blows. This is going to expose vast swathes of the innards of the inherent contradictory structure of copyright law. It's utterly laughable to watch some academics advocate the forced artificial scarcity of knowledge. Maybe we will see some nice collateral damage occurring in some prestigious institutions of higher education, who by their tacit consent are violating their mission charters to advance knowledge. If they aren't careful, they will expose the very churn and burn business nature of the paper degree pushing Union Cards they are bestowing upon us peasantry.
These are exciting, exciting, almost Revolutionary, times! If copyright law is eliminated, humanity will be freed from the chains of artificial scarcity ignorance. The textbook account of the elimination of imaginary property is being written in our time. Hahaha. I just love it!
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
It only takes one student on a course to collect all the books together and make a CD. It will then get copied around pretty quickly. I spent an absolute fortune on books when I was at Uni in the mid 90s. Every term I had to transport over a hundredweight of books home (so I could keep reading/working), and then back again for the next term. There's no way I would go through all that aggravation and expense now. Either they would have to sell me an electronic copy for a lot less, or I would grab a copy of the inevitable CD full of all the required books that would be circulating among the students.
Of course, perpetual access to the internet may mean that books are not quite as critical as they once were. I used to try to get every book I could, because if one book explained a particular topic badly (e.g. Fractional Quantum Hall Effect), another might excel on that topic. These days I could just search for that topic on the internet and get dozens of different explanations.
Only if they're torrents of excerpts.
Fair use is not a clear cut exception to copyright. You left out the section right after that quote that clarifies that judging fair use depends on factors such as how much of the original work you copied and how you're using it.
I live in Alexandria. The public libraries here blow.
Bah, just take the Metro and go to the Library of Congress.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Why the hell is Richard Stallman right about everything?
The people behind that ABSOLUTE POS of a site ought to be SHOT.
That has got to be the BIGGEST POS I have EVER seen.
First, yeah, run an illegal torrent site, but bend over and spread them as soon as a textbook publisher says "boo" (read their front page, what a bunch of pussies)
Then, one must sign up to see the subject index. The sign up form is a piece of trash -*horrid. Then, after you sign up, you go to the subject index and find that it is "temporarily disabled".
If you read the bottom of the thing, what do you see? One of the dickhead fucktards says he won't make the same mistake of using the script they are using again, well, if it is that bad QUIT FUCKING USING IT.
I hope one of them reads this.
And how pathetic, placing ads, offering ads, and begging for donations all over the place . . . those fucks are scammers is what they are, and brainless incompetent pussies to boot.
Shoot them I say.
SARAVA!
While it might not work for the more advanced subjects or those like history that need to be updated more often. The textbook required to teach language, math, science 1st through at least the 10th grade haven't changed in quite some time. The Algebra I I used 30 years ago would be adequate today.
Copyright law (contrary to popular opinion) was originally designed to protect the populace (not the publishers). After some time, the work was to be in the public domain. I think it would be a really good idea for a group of educators to set up sites where copies of good textbooks that have expired copyrights available for download.
We keep hearing how our schools don't have enough money. This would go a long way of lifting that burden. It has worked for software, why not for textbooks. Some people would even place new textbooks directly into this repository (like open source software).
Just my 2 cents.
When you live and travel between countries that are either under export restrictions, or embargo's (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon) your entire life, you kind of get used to getting books off websites like the aforementioned.
So for someone who gets paid $8/hr, $1 (cost of internet cafe hourly rate) as oppose to $100 for a book, isn't sth to ponder on for long.
Nice of them to charge $120 for a book that has virtually no useful content but is required to get the assignments out of and then refuse to buy back the books because they are out-dated supposedly.
I've taken to looking for PDF versions of all my text books and tech books both because of price and because I want to be able to carry massive amounts of useful books around on a laptop or a e-book so I have them when I need them. Even the books I actually buy I try to find a torrent for because I don't want to pay twice for the same book just because I also want it as a PDF.
I think all publishers should make a PDF version available for free to people who own a legit hard copy of a book. It'd make me more likely to buy the hard copy and would be extremely useful to me.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Having seen all the tricks pulled at our University to get us to purchase expensive, heavy, dry, poorly edited and typo-filled course texts, we learnt a few tricks to save our pennies for better things (like Beer):-
1. Two students purchase the book, the rest of the class chip in for the shared cost, and we all shared the book.
2. Buy last year's version
3. Borrow from the University Library
4. Question the lecturer if the recommended course text is *really* any good for his course, or not, In a lot of cases they all 'fessed up, and pointed us to better books or online sources (both of which were free or nearly free).
Sure. Here they are.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Nothing there. Completely nonprofit noncommercial and completely for educational purposes.
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
Uh, what is it's nature? It covets? It's nature is that it is infinitely reproducible information, itself containing many aspects of public domain non copyrighted knowledge. It only seems fair that one be able to enlist an infinite team of interns to comb the file to make sure there are not any copyright infringements (or instances of plagiarism, or instances of incorrect attribution) in the file. Anything less is a civil and criminal violation of free speech and the Legal Discovery process.
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
They had better damn well not be included any single instances of public domain non copyrighted ideas or expressions in their circumscribed copyright claim. If a physics textbook contains the formula E=mc^2, there is certainly no valid copyright claim on that expression. So add those up and SUBTRACT from the "substantiality of the portion...as a whole."
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
If they are no longer selling last semesters edition, they have no valid claim to be seeking profit from last semesters edition. Thus, we will always be one edition behind on their tails. And Professors already copy the entirety of many copyrighted works for the entire class, such as newspaper articles.
Plus not to mention we can divide the torrent into as many different sections, chapters, diagrams, and/or words as we desire. Infinitely divisible + infinitely re-combine-able = FTW. So download chapter 1 today, chapter 2 tomorrow, etc, however you want, whenever you want.
Yarrgh! Bring on the countersuits of illegal spying, unlicensed gathering of evidence, negligent non identification of specific individuals, harassment and stalking of students. They'll just be financing some free tuition plus graduation house gifts until they give up, utterly defeated, utterly destroyed.
Satisfied?
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Are you sure 'Fair use' implies copying the entire work?
In the UK at least, the educational exception in copyright law specifies that only around 10% of a work may be copied (and photocopiers in schools and universities often have a notice about this on display). if you photocopy an entire book, you're straight back to old-fashioned copyright infringement.
the poor quality of many textbooks considered ONLY as physical objects is exteremely irritating. If I pay US$120 for a book I think it is fair to expect it to last through a semester of normal use without falling apart; Indeed, it should be able to serve as a reference for many years! The worst case I remember was for an ASL (American Sign Language) course I took a few years ago; the book was a floppy stack of what amounted to compressed paper towels. The pages tended to stick to one's hands due to their extremely hygroscopic nature (the physical sensation was rather disgusting). The bookbinding was a spiral wire, and pages tended to rip loose very easily. The book was extremely "floppy" and difficult to hold. The price for this adventure shoddy design ? US$60.00 !
This was a complete ripoff without even considering the actual content of the book.
If market realities mean prices must be high to make an honest profit, then fine! Raise 'em a bit MORE and build a decently robust object.
I really could have used this last year as I decided to jump back into the college world after working like a monkey for 5 years.
I had looked high and low for a textbook repository, legal or not. I can stick my middle finger up just as easily as the book publishers.
I was never able to find anything on the pirate bay or any other sites. Where is this godsend to college students?
You're nothing; like me.
Why are the prices for textbooks so high when solutions like lulu.com make publishing free and easy and leave the resulting books as reasonably priced as the author requires?
Dover publishes textbooks that are old, but still useful, for a far more reasonable price than they charge for new textbooks.
"Professors aren't like John Grisham or Tom Clancy."
GHOST WRITERS?
Clancy, like many authors, has ghost writers, too. They on occasion just add a few pages of their own writing to that another author or team wrote. Not all authors these days are or remain TRULY successful as they age. Sometimes their fans who really identify with the author and have a lot more pizazz to extend the original work are their best friends. But, as long as the books are bought and not pirated (tho they are resold), these authors will probably thrive -- depending upon what royalties they negotiate.
Academic book authors and publishers, OTOH, IMO, need to seriously rethink their business model. We've had for far too many years now PDFs which can be displayed by hand-held devices (including some gaming devices and MP3 players) for there to be these hefty paperbacks still reigning king.
I'd say, too, that a LOT of universities can put a dent in this wing of publishing just by being compelled to show how "green" they are. As in, their carbon foot print. For every student carrying around heavy books, that is the extent of the carbon footprint of that university. As for publishers of back-breaking books which end up in the backpacks of young children, SHAME on THEM. They could be exacerbating scoliosis (which I had, but emerged unscathed, as I engaged in rigorous fitness exercises before I joined the USN, and I did this to because my doctor almost sabotaged my plans to join the USN by recommending my father get me into surgery, in which a titanium rod would have been attached and fused to my spine. I shuddered and said to myself something along the lines of "fuck that". I ran, did innumerable sit-ups, push-ups, jumpjacks, Marine Corps-style duck walks, and other stuff I learned from the Young Marines, the Navy JROTC, and other places...), which is not necessarily the worst disorder around, but still hauling those books can't be good for a youngster's developing spinal column, not to mention it could retard growth in some kids, induce poor posture, and more. These things might unnecessarily compress organs and reduce lung capacity in some.
Anyway.... I made it to "The Nav", and nowadays, people who look at my back don't see nearly the curvature I *used* to have. Self- or age-corrected, no pins, no back braces, no alteration surgery.
With huge laptops and 17" displays that some of us DO carry, PDFs may be the way to go, or indexed help-file-like course material may be the better exchange of weight. Maybe instructors could create their own voice-coached Courses on Tape, so students can listen while on public transit. Better, lighter, spindle-able electronics would help, too. But, until these wallet-pirating publishers return pricing to the sane levels, students will pirate, or buy used, or buy new and pool/share over-priced name-stipulated course books.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I was browsing this site looking for more good ebook site links, but wasn't finding any. Here's one I already know about: http://elbitz.net/ enjoy!
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
my boss has an XLR that he paid about $90 grand for that is NICE. The STS and DTS are pretty nice cars also, and the CTS is the 2008 motortrend car of the year.
Now if he was driving an 85 el Dorado, you are certainly correct.
it is a sure sign taht books being locked up, and gettin more expensive is a stifle on information, and if these trends continue we are headed to a new dark ages
10% X 10 = 100%. Ch1.tor, Ch2.tor, ... Ch10.tor, you don't have to be interested in the entirety of the work at the same time.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
So if something costs too much stealing is ok?
So by that logic if I can't afford a helicopter/plane/car/tv stealing one is fine?
So what he's saying is that current textbook publishing practices were developed to keep "one step ahead of the pirates" rather than to keep "one step ahead of the used book market?"
That's the kind of "spin" you'd expect from a professor of marketing.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
...I'd mod you up. It's easy to choose to forgo buying music because it's expensive and you don't like the industry's business practices, but the textbook publishers have their (mostly poor)customers by the short hairs, and they leverage that for all their worth. It's time for a change.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I'd love to see a site like this which traffics in the outrageously priced journals such as Science, Nature, JAMA, et. al. Scientific knowledge should have no economic barriers.
... can't write or teach worth a damn, I've got tonnes of books written by experts that are not worthy of being called "textbook" or even for teaching much of anything.
If there's anything I've learned in my life is that ALL areas of knowledge overlap to many degrees, and you can begin learning something from many points along the line but, there needs to be a MAP, many people who 'don't learn properly' or looked down upon by others and university professors aren't simply 'stupid', many of them start off at the wrong entry point into a sphere of knowledge or discipline.
I've wondered about taking thebrain -- http://www.thebrain.com/ and it's SDK and wiki-fying it so that people around the industry can share what kinds of subjects and math they use for what the do, so students aren't totally blind, then off that map, you can hire the best text/teaching book writers to go at it and do their thing.
Most people tend to personalize their language or are not verbose enough for the beginner in explaining with depth all the many things that need to be learned. Often professors and experts do teach from the bottom up, they think perspectivistly from the top down, which ends up bastardizing and distorting the quality of education for many young and upcoming students.
When I was going to college, when my friends had an expensive book that I needed, I would ask to borrow it for a couple of days. In that time, I would scan all the pages onto my laptop. Its worth 10 hours of work for a free $100 dollar textbook if you ask me. I then distributed copies to everyone that wanted it.
There are some students already who have certain reading disabilities that are already allowed to have digital versions of copyrighted materials, so that they can enlarge the print to see it easier, or so that the computer can translates the written words into oral words. The Americans with Disabilities Act ensures that such students have legal access to such shape shifting of copyrighted textbook material. And Universities may even be required to deliver those services (though I think most if not at all would be voluntarily accommodating).
But there's no reason the entire cost of the printing and shipping cannot be eliminated from offering students the possibility of purchasing digital versions. Of course the publishers don't want to do that because then those versions will be hosted on torrent P2P sites and sneaker net copied by multiple students in the same class from flash drive to flash drive.
Publishing hard paper versions is and will ever be a more niche industry. Publishing in general is offering ZERO economic value to the spreading of information. It's economic reality.
Professors and Universities too will eventually be competing just to be heard. There is a whole overloaded ton of juicy redundant fat to be cut from the entire educational system, world-wide, from K-PhD. We are talking about monstrous orders of scale of magnitude, such as anywhere from 75%-90% of the money currently completely wasted on an inefficient off-line redundant educational system. How ridiculous is it for 30 students to listen to a professor talk in a room in a building when BILLIONS could simultaneously do so!
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Dear Publisher --
You have edited an excellent Mathematics book that has gone out of print. In fact, it has been over 3 decades since you showed any interested in this excellent work. It seems there is no profit to be made out of this fine work.
Since you have demonstrated no interest in the intellectual heritage of mankind, instead of simply letting that fine work rot away in some library - or worse - sent to be recycled by the librarian (who thinks the book is too old to be of any interest), I have decided that I will keep that work alive, by scanning the book and releasing it into the Internet.
I feel you have no claims to copyright or any other such irrational arguments, since you yourself have done nothing to keep that outstanding intellectual achievement alive.
Sincerely yours,
Anonymous,
King of the Internet
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
good discussion points
How do you figure this? As a professor I choose the best textbook for the course but all the money goes to the publisher and text book author zero goes to me. All the supplementary materials I write are available free to the students: they are already paying tuition so it would be unethical for me to charge them for it. Unless your professors are using their own books using an illegal copy does not hurt them directly. Indeed it is more likely to cause the publishers to raise prices which will hurt students.
As a professor I noted this and so now I write all my own assignment questions. Not only does this mean that students can use old editions but it also means that they are better prepared for the exams since I write those questions too.
the problem with fair use is that by the time you win your case, your legal fees will be roughly on par with the national debt.
i don't know about you, but filing for bankruptcy is not how i would like to celebrate my victory over the publishers.
-I only code in BASIC.-
A few years ago I had an idea about this and Ive been waiting to see if it ever happened. Basically I thought maybe a consortium of universities around the world could organise a kind of "offical" wiki for say scientific work(doesnt matter what subject... lets say physics)
I've had the same idea, also for physics! However I could never get my colleagues interested enough in it to form a critical mass. Unlike the other efforts on the web I want a citizendium like approach: only qualified people can contribute to the Wiki. However, inspired by an idea from citizendium I've been toying with something slightly different.
Instead of profs writing the entries I was thinking of setting an assignment for the students to write parts of the text. The requirement being that the result would be released under a suitable CC license and edited by myself or others (it would be in a wiki). This is good for several reasons:
So is this something you students would be happy doing? What do you think of it? Any suggestions for a Wiki to use? Ideally it would have PDF export and the ability to restrict access to certain pages. Is anyone already doing this? I know that Eduzendium exists but this is more about writing encyclopedia articles which is less useful/applicable to physics.
I was always lucky enough to have profs that would have a copy or two of the book on reserve in the library. Way before torrents, I would just photocopy the whole book if it was absurdly expensive. I still have several copies of large books on file in my closet. Not sure what the average photocopy goes for these days.
I can't wait the .torrent edition of ScienceDirect, the prices there more than high.
At some point, I could even see some professors offering a subscription to their research allowing continous updates to the information they find. Perhaps even providing a private slash site for full discussion of the topic with experts around the world. It's value being other subscribers.
For those students that feel they have to have a printed copy to study from, offer a print and binding service through the bursars office. This allows the University to reap some profit from the sale of the book and, they are more apt to carry this style.
Where we would run into problems is quality assurance. With textbook manufacturing, there is an existant QA team in place to ensure their product is at least mostly worth what they say it is. If they transition to an electronic format and ensure the QA with each release, perhaps even outsource the editing to university students around the country. No student with more than a few pages of any one book so they are not keeping copies for them selves. Thus offering a bit of cash back to the student and maybe a discount on the books.
I can't believe I just published this idea...
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers I wonder why? Let me count the ways! Maybe because you charge $140 for a book that cost you $10 to make? Or how about your monopolist practices that are sanctioned by our state, local and federal governments. Maybe, you like ripping off American students, because other governments around the world either subsidize or mandate that you keep your prices reasonable. Ike misled America, so his brotherâ(TM)s industrial complex could really rip off America!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It is the duty of the student-consumer to fight back by using arbitrage: international student editions.
One example: Introduction to Electrodynamics by Griffiths. Amazon shows $107.20, list $134.00. You can order it from India for maybe $45.00 including shipping. It arrives quickly. Then you look at the rupee price sticker that someone left on the book, and find that it sold in India for the equivalent of US$4.50.
You get the book for less than half price, and some enterprising fellow in India gets a 7x markup (I'm subtracting the cost of shipping).
Chances are that the international student edition will also be more convenient to use, in that it will be printed on ordinary paper rather than the cripplingly heavy clay coat paper that nearly all American editions of textbooks are printed on.
I weighed a recent edition of a popular introductory biology textbook (Campbell) ... over 7 pounds. One cannot study from such a book, much less lug it around on campus.
At these outrageous prices, one might expect that the publisher would be doing something apart from ringing the cash register and permuting pages to create new "editions" to force obsolescence.
Wrong. The editors are too busy making new editions to pay attention to essentials. Textbooks, especially the back-of-book solutions, are rife with errors. Errata, if they are issued at all, are often far from complete.
The editors, despite their great energy at creating new editions, appear to have little or no expertise either in the subject matter or in pedagogical technique.
Fowles and Cassiday's Analytical Mechanics lists for a whopping $204.95 ($163.96 from Amazon). This book spends pages on marginally relevant historical discussion, then in the essential material, explains so little and skips so many steps in derivations, that one is left hanging off the edge of a cliff for topic after topic. Don't get me wrong: historical discussion is wonderful, but not when it uses page space that should have been used for more complete exposition. Especially when the page space is priced like Manhattan real estate.
I have found that it is useful to buy cheap old used copies of classic textbooks, from a time before color illustrations, dense clay coat paper, and edition-churning. Many of these books are clearly superior to modern editions.
The publishers are evil and need to die.
That whooshing sound was your moral high ground evaporating. All that this scam does is hurt people who still buy and sell their used books without copying them - which is not a crime - and drive them to actual copyright infringement in order to afford their education.
Of course, if you're in the business of content publishing, you see no difference between legal second-hand trading and illegal copying, since neither makes you money. And the illegal way might in fact be preferable, since you can get money out of litigation.
IMO, books like other media are dying as products. People are going to have to deal with the new tech killing off old business models. It's simple supply and demand. If you can digitize something you can reproduce it perfectly, infinitely. That means supply is virtually infinite. Any finite demand divided by infinity is as close to zero as makes no odds. The value of data is 0. This is the beauty of FOSS business models, and the model of say, google. Change what you're selling. i get that writing a book is time consuming and requires skill and effort etc, but it's time to adapt or die. Write a text book and charge for something else (or maybe just deal with making less money).
This is what i think should happen: Various profs write text books and give them away on something you could call FreeTextBooks.org. Then the books compete to be the most downloaded. A softcopy text book has limited uses... many students will still want a hard copy so they can use it when having a laptop is inconvenient. Instead of making money on expensive books, publishing becomes a means to build reputation. If Dr. Soandso's book is the most popular he can cash in that fame for a job at a more prestigious school.
Also... it isn't piracy. Piracy is armed robbery on a boat. The article describes copyright violation. Don't let them misuse words to make a civil offense sound like a violent crime. Furthermore, copyright violation is theft only if talking to my neighbor over the fence is stealing from the phone company.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
(Quote from end of article)
He said that if the problem worsens, publishers may have to take other steps to prevent piracy, such as releasing a new version of most textbooks every semester. The versions could include slight modifications that could be changed easily--such as altering the numbers in math problems.
"They may be compelled to," he said, "in order to stay one step ahead of the pirates."
(End quote)
Copying of anything gets easier and easier. Actions such as this may even encourage the development of a underground 'industry', that copies books and sells them in some form on the Web, or just torrents them. One of the key problems people have with these publishers, is their re-arrangement of material at an inflated price, just to be able to sell a new edition every year. Have they ever heard of releasing a supplement, with the new material? A complete new version every semester will just give them another reason to copy or download their books, vs buying a new copy. They really need to look at the recording industry model, and see how 'gouging' the customer on price at every opportunity is not how to sell more copies, and how new distribution methods such as E-Books (or equivalent) could make money for them, too.
V for Vendetta: People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
Maybe coursesmart.com is the iTunes for textbooks. That would help.
Seems like a good idea, but there's one issue with it. You can only assign each section once. It'd be a great way to kick start the wiki, but you can't really do it every single year. However, having graduate students release their research into this sort of encyclopedia would be a great idea.
Cynical Idealist
I am not talking about the publisher/owner I am talking about those who actually do the work of manufacturing a book.
Thank you - stating an opinion is not trolling. Some people actually lose jobs when then their employers have financial loses.
Now I'm wanting to take your Physics class. I am a regular editor/contributor to a technical Wiki for a bit of software that does film/video compositing and editing and I find that I retain knowledge very well on the portions I have edited.
All ready finished my undergrad degree, though.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Just to let you all know, i got about close to 100,000 ebooks for free...Can you beat that?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thanks very much to the stupidity of jryoung@gmail.com, posting his story on Slashdot was a surefire way to kill the site. And that's exactly what happened:
"I have some more bad news for you: we've had our server pulled out from under us. Call it a "personality conflict" with our former new host--apparently they're not too happy with hosting a BitTorrent tracker, particularly one that has has been getting so much recognition of late."
They'll get it set up somewhere else, but jryoung@gmail.com *YOU ARE NOT INVITED*.