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.

Comments

Library of Alexandria

[MacDork]

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

Dirty thieves

[Anonymous Coward]

You are stealing from the pockets of the professors who change the text book every semester making your used book worthless.

Re:Dirty thieves

[InlawBiker]

I know where they are. There are several hundred pounds of them in my basement. They're there because I missed the deadline to sell them back to the bookstore before a new edition came out and now I'm stuck with them. But I figure if I hold on to them long enough, eventually a new addition will come out re-arranged in the exact configuration these old ones are in and they'll be worth something again.

Re:Dirty thieves

[cayenne8]

"The prof drives a Cadillac. He doesn't need my money."

He might indeed need that money. A cadillac ain't that great a car...

Now, if he was in a Porsche or high end BMW, well you might have room to bitch...

:-)

Screw the textbooks...

[Thelasko]

where are the answer keys?

Re:Books too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well don't quit your... oh wait...

Re:Exactly.

[nizo]

I must admit it will be easier to send a pdf rather than an actual book when I outsource getting my degree overseas.

Re:$75 for an ethics book

[Thelasko]

So, what are you going to do? Get a pirated copy of your ethics book?

Don't cheat the students!

[PCM2]

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.

Re:Don't cheat the students!

[CodeBuster]

Where would we be if our students didn't understand the latest developments in trigonometry or first-semester calculus?

answer: where we are right now.

Re:Don't cheat the students!

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Slashdot?

Re:Library of Alexandria, VA

[bornyesterday]

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!

Re:$75 for an ethics book

[smellsofbikes]

My girlfriend recently took a class called "Ethics In Computer Science" and another called "Philosophy of Mediation" and realized that she could write *one* paper to satisfy a homework assignment from each class.

So which is worse: writing it for the Ethics class, then reusing it for Philosophy after you've taken the Ethics class, or writing it for the Philosophy class and then reusing it for the Ethics class?

We decided the latter was more acceptable after arguing about it for a while, on the basis that, hey, she hadn't learned about ethics yet, right?