Copyright lobby targets Pirate Bay for textbooks

 

Copyright lobby targets "Pirate Bay for textbooks"

21 April 2009 8:54 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny | 23 comments

Finnish book rental service Bookabooka is being threatened by national copyright lobby organization TTVK for running a service the lobby group calls "Pirate Bay for textbooks".
Bookabooka doesn't host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional "snailmail" (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn't handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.
Despite these "small" differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers' association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.
TTVK demands (PDF, in Finnish) that the service must be shut down by Friday this week or they'll sue the company. Bookabooka's founders have already stated that they wont respond to the threats, but instead will keep the service running.

Copyright lobby targets Pirate Bay for textbooks

The Diamondback - Guest column: Online freedom

The Diamondback - Guest column: Online freedom 

Guest column: Online freedom

By: Catherine Simpson

Posted: 2/19/09

Did you know the average student spends about $1,000 annually on textbooks alone? This massive expense is about half of the tuition of an average two-year institution, and all we get out of it are books that only six percent of us will ever read in their entirety.
The article in Tuesday's Diamondback, "Professors take aim at high book expenses," highlighted the issue of skyrocketing textbook prices. Textbook prices have increased roughly four times the rate of inflation, making affording college an even bigger issue. On top of budget cuts, tuition hikes and lack of resources, college is becoming too expensive for the average student and leaving millions in debt. Shouldn't we start to take control of our expenses?
Professors Allen Stairs and Sonya Michel proposed that faculty should come together to save students money and make use of the wide array of digital and textbook alternative resources available to faculty members right now. The university's chapter of the Maryland Public Interest Research Group is already working on organizing a forum to bring faculty members together this semester to discuss what options exist.
Open textbooks are the best alternative option. Professors and leading researchers can create an online textbook with free, open access to any interested person. Teachers can choose information from multiple sources and edit it for their needs, cutting out the excess information found in most textbooks that students have to pay for. Not only does this reduce the cost for students, it also allows flexibility for teachers to teach from many different sources instead of one fixed book.
While many may not be aware of this issue, the open textbook movement is making headway in many areas, and people are interested. A survey of faculty at 28 different colleges and universities across the country asked opinions on education resources such as open textbooks. An overwhelming 91 percent responded that they would be interested in using open textbooks, but only 34 percent knew there were resources to use.
Fields such as science, medicine and health have an overwhelming amount of open information available to them, and the social sciences have a wealth of opportunity in this field, as well. These books are of the same quality as current textbooks, and are written by leaders in these fields. Additionally, the resources already out there are already being used by peer institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology - MIT even has a digital databank of resources for almost every course at the school. The information is out there, it just needs to be used.
This university has an opportunity to be a leader in the evolution of textbooks and information resources. However, faculty members shouldn't have to go it alone to find these materials - the administration and departments should work with faculty members to assist them in making this transition.
And as students, we must take it upon ourselves to ask our teachers and administration what they can do to help make a better, innovative classroom experience.
Catherine Simpson is a senior criminology and criminal justice and sociology major. She can be reached at csimpso4@umd.edu.

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© Copyright 2009 The Diamondback

The Diamondback - Guest column: Online freedom

First it was downloads. Now it's organic chemistry. - International Herald Tribune

 

First it was downloads. Now it's organic chemistry.

By Randall Stross

Published: July 27, 2008

After scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for "all publishers" of college textbooks, warning them that "myself and all other students are tired of getting" ripped off. (The contributor's message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John McMurry's "Organic Chemistry." A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it's about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.

But many people outside of the students' enclosed world would call that plain theft.

Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly 1,300 pages of "Organic Chemistry" into a digital file requires much more time than ripping a CD.

The textbook publishers have abundantly good reasons to promote e-books. When Cengage sells an e-book version of "Organic Chemistry" directly to students, for $109.99, it not only cuts out the middleman but also reduces the supply of used books at the end of the semester.

THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history indicates, will be broken sooner or later. But as long as it does work, digital publishing with a subscription model is a much fairer basis for the business. Such an arrangement spreads revenue across multiple semesters, so it isn't the unfortunate few students in the first semester with a new edition who shoulder the bulk of the burden.

A one-semester e-book subscription does require a change in expectations. Students cannot sell their texts at the end of a course, so buying one can't be viewed as a short-term investment to be cashed out. But as students show no attachment to textbooks in any case, the loss of access after semester's end seems likely to go unlamented.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

First it was downloads. Now it's organic chemistry. - International Herald Tribune