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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.
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.
Tricks of the Trade:
If the teacher hands out a syllabus with homework: take photos of every single homework problem. I had a good high res camera. Much faster than scanning. When it came time to do homework I just printed out the problem and did it. I got a $5 2 edition old book to actually use as reference.
Learn if the teacher actually hands out problems from the book, if not, get an edition 2-3 old.
Get an 'international' edition. Yes, those poor Chinese/Indians get cheap Microsoft products AND cheap books. Be careful, it won't be hard cover.
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.
I only had one professor that required us to buy a book that he had written and it was actually one of the best text books I bought. The book was paper back so it was light and not a pain to carry, it cost $20 and it was actually relevant to the course.
I doubt he even made a profit on it, he seemed more interested in providing us a fairly inexpensive valuable learning tool. Too bad other professors couldn't be bothered.
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?"
Yes, teachers do get a kick back. One of my professors told our post grad class (during one of the much loved 'pub lectures') how they could stand to make $1000s from recommending the 'right' books.
The Mothership
Kindle is not an accurate use for digital distribution. It's a big ole marketing hype. Kindle is akin to 1 step of a complete staircase.
Content control is not the solution, and the device is a piece of garbage. DRM and other problems left and right. People just like that it's cheaper than normal books. This not being kindle's fault but the publisher's own.
Wait until people create a double sided OLED bendable/foldable reader....then you're good. I'm sure its being developed as we speak, probably by MIT or CMU.
Once book prices go reasonable online (say 2-5 bucks a book at maximum), then things will sell like hotcakes and piracy will drop. For now, even e-books for some books are ridiculously priced.
Internet/computers have created their own market for pricings. Until pricing gets to a volume level instead of scarcity level, things will continue to be purchased illegitimately. I'm not going to trade a night of going out to the bars just to buy a textbook...but I will download it free instead.
Or the instructor could just not collect/correct homework as well as grade on tests. One of my favorite profs in college did just that. He would assign problems, but would never collect them. He could tell if you did them by how you did on the tests/quizzes which were always based on the same concepts he stressed in the homework assignments. The best side affect was that he would answer ANY question you had on your homework. You didn't have to play games like you had to with other profs/TAs who would say, "well, I can't tell you that, but what if you ask me this?" and would wind up wasting your time and theirs. All in an effort to not give you a hint which would allow you to answer the question without "earning" said answer. Of course what happened instead is all the students would simply do their homework in giant groups or just google for the problem(surprisingly effective)
Not to mention a huge part of the learning process is making mistakes when they don't cost very much. That is part of how I learn at least. By grading us both on homework and tests you are telling us its better to make sure you know how to game the system than it is to actually UNDERSTAND the material.
Monstar L
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".
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
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
You're lucky, then.
I had one professor that was too lazy to keep changing the book every year. He just wrote up some crappy software that was required to be able to do the coursework, then threatened an instant fail for anyone caught violating the software license by selling it along with the textbook. The only place to get a legal copy of the software was along with a new (very expensive) textbook.
Writers of very popular course books will get some return, but for most of us writing specialist texts this isn't the case.
So wouldn't it be better if specialists in the same field, perhaps from different universities, set up a public read limited write wiki site where articles on various topics of interest, sample problems, and other course and research related materials could be created and maintained by the community to the benefit of everyone including the students? The materials would be complete and up to date, or at least they could be, and the distribution costs would be minimal.
Nowadays, most profs aren't allowed (by either law, Board of Regents ethics codes, or by school policy) to require their own authored textbooks for taking their own classes.
OTOH, this hasn't stopped a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" racket where two profs teaching the same subject in different schools or states will each require the other's authored textbook (at some pretty hefty prices) as part of the coursework.
(IIRC, it depends on locality, and some may have a limit on what they can charge otherwise for the things).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That's an interesting point, and the answer is I don't know. I suppose the job of the publisher or maybe the editors in that regard is to identify the need for the book, decide on the contents, to identify suitable authors and to make sure the whole book makes narrative sense. They then ask the authors to contribute their chapters. The authors and their parent institutions then get their names and perhaps more importantly their points of view published and read.
Of course there was nothing to stop me writing my chapters on my own and self publishing them, but there would be no guarantee they would ever be read, and quite simply without being asked it would never have occurred to me to do it.
Mainly because the sale price of the used book if no colleges are using them quickly drops $1 or so. Someone might have this used book, they check to see the going price, its only $1, they shelve it and forget about it forever.
I wonder if there is a business to be made on that kinda stuff. Posting a list of all the books you have then letting you know when the going price for that book goes up or there is someone wanting the book who can't find it.
My record was a published-on-site book by the professor, $276. Useless. We opened it ONCE in class, and maybe 4 times out of class. By the 2nd week i returned it to the book store claiming i got the wrong one, and 4 friends and i shared one. The prof drives a Cadillac. He doesn't need my money. I do. Tuition is $38,000/yr. He's one of those guys who thinks engineering should be expensive and hard to learn so there are less in the field, so they can charge more.
Academics often contribute to textbooks without being paid. I wrote a chapter for a textbook recently and am currently working on another, and I won't get any financial return for either
You might not get any financial return, but you will get popularity. Academic success is rated by the number of published papers, and referenced papers. Remember, 'publish or perish'.
BTW, if the site admin from the textbook torrents is reading, I found the following info interesting:
First, I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to prevent the server's logs from falling into the hands of those that might use them against you.
What he should do is remove the logs. Remove every log you have, and do not log absolutely anything! that way you wont have to provide information you do not have.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
For several years I was the textbook buyer for a mathematics department at a large university in the US. Based on my experiences in that job, I must agree that it is the publishers making the money and pushing the new editions to hamper the sales of used books. Faculty often get "free copies" in exchange for reviewing the book (some payment, especially if you don't adopt the new text). One book rep was even honest enough to admit this to me, "off the record" as it were. There were two markets of students, and they were serviced by two groups of book sellers (this was before people started to really buy textbooks from Amazon etc). One market was served by the campus bookstore, who were supplied primarily by the publishers (and also the used textbooks sold back to them by some students). The other market, supplied entirely by used book dealers, catered to students looking for a better price than the university bookstore would give them (in all honesty, the price difference was usually very small). The faculty member I worked with when choosing books always tried very hard to keep one textbook in continuous use as long as possible. So, we encouraged faculty to use our online resources rather then the customized ones made available by the publishers (only to those who purchased new books, of course). We also asked the campus bookstore each semester how many used editions they had in stock, and only ordered enough new books to make up the difference, based on enrollment figures. Basically, we did everything we could to reuse textbooks, and the publishers did everything they could to prevent us (and the students, their real customers) from doing so. Textbooks come and textbooks go, but Calculus will live on forever...
I knew several lecturers who co-wrote several large paperbacks and had them placed into the library. They basically assembled information from dozens of text books and were structured to easily explain it (I have a photocopy of the RF Microelectronics book.) The books were for those interested in doing better in class and were designed to accompany the lectures. One lecturer even offered PDF sections of one of the books to help with certain parts of his module.
All course material was free and easily accessable on a modified version of ms exchange, which I can still access 1 year after leaving university. I used to recieve around 1000 pages of module information for every module and while every lecturer had a recommended reading list after the 1st year in University I noticed the free course material often went into greater depth and was better explained than the books I was paying £50 for. I am excluding information gained from classes when I say "course material".
Thats the Univeristy of Plymouth for anyone who's looking to study Electrical/Electronic/Computing/Communications Engineering. The lecturers there teach because they honestly have a passion for the subject and try to imprint it onto their students.
While the first sale doctrine may protect the sale, it doesn't oblige the professor to pretend it didn't happen. He's free to give the buyer any grade he wants or no grade at all, or at least it'll be a civil case based on any agreements between you and the institution and the institution and the professor. At least in the US I think the institution would cover their ass and say you got a grade as required, it's the professor's grade and that decision is final. I don't think there's any way you could force an institution to issue a grade, no matter how much you've deserved it...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Dover publishes textbooks that are old, but still useful, for a far more reasonable price than they charge for new textbooks.