The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on students using BitTorrent to share scanned copies of textbooks. The article, Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers, starts off
“College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy. One Web site, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.”
Text books are an interesting niche for file sharing. They are surely expensive and publishers manage to publish new editions of popular titles almost every year, undermining the market for used texts. On the other hand, digitizing a text book requires scanning it, which takes time, attention to detail, equipment, and labor. It’s not as simple as ripping a CD.
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