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-$100 range, and that they're heavy besides. But the big-name textbook publishers are much less interested than I am in open textbooks, even if MIT has demonstrated that open courseware is feasible, and Stanford and other schools have put quite a bit of material on iTunes.
I always wondered how the P2P/Napster thing would have turned out if it had been given a better, more descriptive name like: Library of Alexandria
You are stealing from the pockets of the professors who change the text book every semester making your used book worthless.
The problem isn't just that they are expensive, but that the publishers are trying to bilk the students. They include CD-ROMs they know are useless as an excuse to charge higher prices and they come out with a new "edition" every year that changes the page numbers and exercise numbers so that students can't rely on used textbooks.
They got too greedy and pushed too far and that is what will actually give people the motivation to push back.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
The scam of requiring a new textbook every three years with the page numbers being the biggest change almost makes the music industry look like nice people.
After having to pay for a new algebra book (75$'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.
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.
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.
It's my understanding that a lot of schools will contract out the buyback program at their school, and there's companies that travel around and buy the old books, presumably to sell at other smaller schools, online, etc.
Once I figured this out, I brought a bunch of my used, older textbooks back to my current school at the beginning of one semester to return. some of these being from another school in another country. since the buyback company's software had the isbn/book in its system, they gave me credit for the book. I came back the next day with a bunch of my wife's old textbooks, and some more of mine, and after one or two books came up not in their system, a supervisor came over and informed me that I couldn't just unload my old books onto them, despite their computer having accepted them, and despite the posters everywhere talking about "unload your old books...this week only..."
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
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
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
I must admit it will be easier to send a pdf rather than an actual book when I outsource getting my degree overseas.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Hah, that will not happen.
They will offer them with some crazy Windows Vista only DRM, priced the exact same as the printed book, and then use the complete lack of sales as a "see, people don't want e-book versions" example.
(I really wish I was being a bit too pessimistic there, but...)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
So, what are you going to do? Get a pirated copy of your ethics book?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
A note on the 2nd trick. You have to be of greater than a certain intelligence. I used a Chem book 2-3 editions old for Chem I/II (It's freaking chemistry...). I couldn't use any of the "Turn to page XXXX" instructions. Homework never came from the book (there was no homework).
Worst case was they re arranged the chapters. Chapter 4: Reactions was now Chapter 14: Reactions. You have to be smart enough to know how to use a table of contents. I suggested this to my brother (freshmen last year) and it was lost on him. He broke down and ended up buying a book.
One more:
Buy from Half.com EARLY. Most large schools will post their required books before the end of the previous semester. Now is prime time to be shopping. You'll have them for the first day of school and know well ahead of time if they'll work.
Last resort:
For all my engineering books the Engineering Library kept 2 copies at all times that you could not check out. If you're waiting on a book or really want to kill time, you can live in the library to do your homework. If nothing else, just copy the problems out of it every few weeks and use your 'useless' copy as reference.
Finally, Engineers, keep your books. I wish I did. I can't name the times I've needed flow equations, thermo, controls, etc. Sure most of it is on wiki, but it's not in the format that you learned it. Unless you go straight into marketing or something, you're probably going to use something at least once.
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
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!
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".
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.
Don't you mean "Screw you poor student who later bought this book and didn't realize the problem until it's too late"?
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
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
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.
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?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Dover publishes textbooks that are old, but still useful, for a far more reasonable price than they charge for new textbooks.