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Patent Granted on Mandatory Digital Keys to Prevent Textbook Piracy
First time accepted submitter discussM tipped us to a story about a recently granted patent in which "a system and method preventing unauthorized access to copyrighted academic texts is provided in which trademark licenses, discussion boards, and grade content are integrated into a web-based system that aligns the interests of teaching professionals, students, and publishers while also enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge." Quoting Torrent Freak: "As part of a course, students will have to participate in a web-based discussion board, an activity which counts towards their final grade. To gain access to the board students need a special code, which they get by buying the associated textbook." But don't worry too much, from Ars: "Beyond the legal questions, other experts suggested forcing students to buy texts through such a system is unlikely to be implemented. Professors have few incentives to make it more difficult and to compel students even more than they already are to buy textbooks, digital or analog. (A 2011 survey from UC Riverside found that 78 percent of undergraduates 'bought fewer books, bought cheaper books or read books on reserve to help meet expenses.')"
They ought to ask how many professors bought all the textbooks they required as students, and never used photocopies.
...Free and Open textbooks for all their courses.
School is PURELY a financial transaction, but schools want to fuck their customers good and hard. (I found working in a community college highly educational.) They want to make programs fit available funding, and Pell Grant farming is standard.
The profits made on books are calculated as part of the profit of each program. They are NOT provided by the school book store as a convenience, unless you consider anal rape convenient.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Whatever happened to just charging a fee for attending the course?
Stop trying to make extra money through textbook "upsells". Be upfront and honest by charging the book fee as part of the upfront course fees and give each student a copy.
How come good free curriculum hasn't emerged? There are a few free curriculum projects out there, but they tend to have low quality, incompatible formats, and make it difficult for people to contribute.
Because there's not incentive for professors and other professionals to participate in the development of such. If you wanted it to happen, you'd make the professors' pay or tenure contingent on their contributing to the development of public-domain curriculum in their discipline.
I'm in my sophomore year of college, and I've already taken half a dozen classes requiring an $80 online pass.
There are plenty of good, free and low-cost textbooks, and many professors use them.
But, given that students are willing to pay tens of thousands per year to go to college in the first place, a few hundreds dollars in books hardly make a big difference.
I know two professors, one in math, currently working on open source text books at my local college. I know the math prof is looking for a stable book (not reshuffling the order of the problems and calling it a new edition), the ability to correct errors (some of these books have had the same blatant errors for over a decade), the ability to customize for your curriculum (the regular publishers won't even fix obvious errors, so nobody expects them to listen to requests/suggestions), and a reasonable cost (whatever printing costs if you don't have a laptop or something since $120 for a math book loaded with errors is INSANE.)
There are plenty of free or open source textbooks listed if you search, and whether it's appropriate for your class depends on your requirements. Other than that, I can't say anything about the quality of all of them, only the half dozen I've reviewed which looked just fine, but the teachers hadn't gone through them yet.
This seems typical of the world of publishing today. Many publishers are merely money making machines, with little regard for either students, or knowledge. Unfortunately, as publishers adopt more and more predatory practices, they end up pissing off both students and professors. There is one major academic publisher in my field Cengage (who operate under many other names), whose books I now refuse to use. They update editions every three years, doing little more than changing page numbers and changing the order of exercises. Each new edition comes with a substantial price hike and force me to rework sections of my classes. The result of this? I now have the equivalent of an on-line text I have developed myself over the years. So, they have lost the business.
It is the very same publishing houses who are mean about sending us desk copies and charge us for them, if we do not adopt their texts. Again, they end up as losers, as there is no incentive to use their texts. They also get pissy when we sell the books that they send to us, without our asking. This again is silly. In the State in which I teach, professors have not had a pay rise in four years, so a few bucks to buy lunch was a welcome perk. Stopping this perk does not make us like them any more.
That being said, not all publishers are like this. Some keep their editions for a long time and do not change much when they bring out new editions. A good example of this is Oxford University Press. So, when I need to use a text for a class, all the business goes to OUP. This is the correct way to do business in publishing. It should not be about quarterly results, but rather about building and maintaining long term relationships. The technological innovation described in the post is just yet another step in the wrong direction. Eventually though, publishers will have to work out the errors of their ways, or perish./p
They think we live in fairy land
I think they live in a fairy land. From the summary.
...enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge.
The idea that protecting copyright helps encourage the creation process is at least a valid idea. However I don't see any way that restricting the ability to copy that knowledge somehow helps disseminate it.
Authors have a *right* to direct how their work is used.
Not content with the right to control sales, now they want you to prove you bought it
in order to take the class.
What happens when roommates decide to share the book? Will they let two students register
with the same book id number for the useless on-line material (which only exists to get your book ID number)?
I shared several books with a roomie in college, because we took the courses at different time of the day.
The hall book-handoff was a daily ritual. We split the price of the book, and resold it splitting the proceeds.
If this scheme locks out Book IDs that were used previously, what happens to the first sale doctrine?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Not that I'm otherwise a huge fan of RMS, but I'm surprised I haven't seen any reference to the "Right to Read" in this discussion yet. Given the direction US copyright and education are going, it gets scarily closer every day.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I agree. The 9th Circuit judges who heard the case I listed do not.
Specifically:
The Court tacitly agrees with the ALA's claims as to the potential effects of the ruling on other media should the licensing practices of the software industry be adopted by other distributors outside the software industry. Book sales are only different because the use of licensing has not been adopted. Without Congressional intervention, book and video sellers are free to adopt the conventions of software licensing and end secondary markets.
You are right, but then it would make sense that Universities, instead of costing the price of a family house, would transform to a professional social network, where individuals with different skills could organize different study groups, and academic reference would be the list of workgroups with their freely available, freely usable published results, depending on the field.
It is insane to see that while the cost of distributing information is rapidly falling, the costs of education is steadily growing.