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By David Rothman

image 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

imageI 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.

 
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