Thousand of bootlegged textbooks are no longer available from Textbook Torrents. The Wired Campus blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education is wondering if action by the publishers forced the site offline.
A better approach by TT would have been to have carried legitimate freebies and worked with publishers in mutually beneficial ways. Granted, I hate to see any site shut down, and I’m wildly in favor of traditional fair use and worried about textbook costs. Furthermore, I know many downloaders would never have bought books in the first place. And some leakage is inevitable. But the publishing world has to draw the line on massive, illegal downloading.
Piracy as a threat to the anti-DRM movement
I speak as a consumer, not just a writer. I can’t tell you how much I loathe DRM—a toxin both for sales and literature. DRM adds technical complexities, won’t let children and others own books for real, and reduces the seriousness of books by linking them to individual tech vendors, some of which will go out of business. The best DRM is none; or maybe publishers can try compromises such as social DRM, a possibility discussed by Adobe’s Bill McCoy, speaking for himself. But for no DRM or SDRM to work, enough consumers need to pay for books.
So, in the end, yes, the possible demise of TT will be for the better—even though I’d have preferred that the site survive as a legitimate one. Perhaps that can still happen. I hope so. Meanwhile I’ll remind both freebie-lovers and publishers of the attractiveness of the library model as one way to help reconcile different interests.
Image credit for photo: Casey West.
The solution, IMO, is for universities to create CC’d textbooks that are free to use for any educational purposes at all levels. I know there are some folks working on this, but not enough.
The solution for TT is to use some completely decentralized P2P technology such as gnutella or trackerless torrents… something that cannot be shut down.
I bet it’s happening and even though the site is down the content lives on elsewhere.
Hi, Tamas. Maybe a solution for the pirates but not the book biz. Heck, I agree with TT that gouges abound in the textbook industry, especially in the form of uneeded and unwanted updates, but I’d like to see more honest and sustainable workarounds. Thanks. David
“but I’d like to see more honest and sustainable workarounds”
Yes but sometimes it takes a little civil disobedience to guide the marketplace to a more equitable outcome for all. 🙂
A better approach by TT would have been to have carried legitimate freebies and worked with publishers in mutually beneficial ways.
I’m looking at a Probability textbook I illegally downloaded, and it says that had exactly 0% chance of working.
HeavyG: That’s exactly how Hollywood was founded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company
Wave that skull and crossbones, baby.
Yep. Disney certainly made his fortune by ripping off the work of others.
Heh-heh. I always forget the adaptations of public domain works Disney did. (But then even when he got his hands on work he had to pay for, it became unrecognizable compared to the source!)
TT will be back. It’s simply a matter of finding another server.
BTW – I think the use of the the term piracy is sloppy. Pirates copy and sell what they’ve copied, usually misrepresenting it as original. Downloaders are generally copyright enfringers who download for personal use. Conflating the two plays into the misrepresentations put forth by industry groups like the RIAA.
Not that many people are blogging about DRM for textbooks, which is a little weird to me. There was a good NYT article today about it, by the way.
Most of us in tech have knee-jerk reactions against DRM, but I think that for textbooks there might be a real opportunity here. What if you could buy a DRM textbook for $25, instead of paying $100-200 for a printed used or new copy?
Right now, the textbook publishers that are releasing DRM textbooks are charging basically full price ($110 in the NYT article), which is a quick way to fail, but a competitive price point might work. 🙂
I wrote about this idea here: http://www.baeronline.com/2008/07/26/textbooks-next-to-try-drm-raises-prices-for-students-by-a-lot/