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.
> 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.
I find your comments viscerally pretentious. Please fuck off.
Bullshit, your professors don't release new editions, your talking about the text book publisher.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell