The used electronic textbook

by billso on Monday, 24 March 2008

From Gizmodo via BoingBoing comes a discussion of electronic book ownership. Electronic books or e-books are digital versions of a book. Users read the e-book on a computer, PDA, or a special e-book reader.

Amazon has its Kindle e-book reader, but I’m not willing to pay US$400 for it. I read enough books every year that Amazon could just give me the reader, and let me buy the e-books. The same goes for Sony’s reader, but at least the Kindle can download books and content through Sprint’s mobile phone network. Sony’s reader has to be loaded from a computer.

Both the Gizmodo and BoingBoing posts are based upon an article in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review entitled The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions, and written by Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert. The article wasn’t available on the Review’s web site, so I’m relying on portions that were posted to the Gizmodo post.

The used paper book

In the United States, paper books may be resold according the first sale doctrine. This rule helps support the used textbook market, by allowing book purchasers to transfer their ownership of a book to another party without violating the copyright holders’ rights. A key point of this rule is that no copies can be made of the book. The book’s owner cannot run down to the copy shop, make a backup or archival copy of the book, and then resell or return the original copy.

As I pointed out on 4 February 2008 in my discussion of this Kevin Kelly post, electronic media are a copy of an original source file. The Internet is a massive digital copy machine, after all. Web users are looking at copies of files their web browser has retrieved from other servers. Batra and his three co-authors address the implications of e-books upon the first sale doctrine. Could a used e-book market exist? Probably not, because e-book purchases don’t have their own physical copy of the book. They might have a license to use an electronic copy of the book.

As the four law students point out, it is up to the courts to determine if purchasing an e-book license is comparable to purchasing a paper book. The authors then discuss the restrictive DRM that Sony and Amazon have added to their electronic book hardware.

Selecting a textbook

It’s enough to give me a wee headache, especially as I evaluate new textbooks for my courses. Instructors use textbooks so students have a ready resource and reference in the course. Textbooks are expensive and heavy, especially in graduate courses. E-books are a nice option, but electronic gadgets are heavy and expensive, too. Many users have problems reading an e-book, and sometimes its difficult or impossible to make notes in an e-book. Paper books don’t need electricity, either.

I really like paper books, but I fear that their days are numbered. Textbook publishers are more sensitive to student complaints about textbook costs these days. The textbook industry has seen what’s happened to the music publishers. It’s not hard to find scanned electronic copies of popular textbooks on file-sharing services. When a significant number of university students stop buying textbooks, we may enter a runaway change scenario. Some academic authors already self-publish their textbooks, so they can offer paper and digital copies at a low price and keep more of the revenue. At some point, the major textbook publishers have to decide what business they are in: the paper book publishing business, or the content distribution business.

Textbooks unbound

I have spoken with two publishers who offer shrink-wrapped versions of their textbooks. These are unbound versions of textbooks. The pages are three-hole punched, so students can slip the book into a binder, or carry the chapters they need for a specific day. This business model sounds more reasonable than an e-book.

There’s a catch, of course. A shrink-wrapped book cannot be returned or sold back to a university bookstore in many cases. So a shrink-wrapped paper copy of a book is, in some ways, as restrictive as an e-book. Of course, students can sell or pass along their used binder books to other students. Unless a student examines that binder closely, they are trusting that the binder includes every page of the book. It’s much easier to pull pages from a binder than from a traditional bound book. That’s one reason that bookbinding helps maintain the value of a paper book.

It’s possible to copy a bound book, of course, but it’s a much faster process if the binding is removed. The scanned or copied pages look more consistent, too. The book’s resale value is destroyed when the binding is removed, but the electronic copies of that paper book can be redistributed.

The unbound paper textbook is a sign that textbook publishers are dealing with runaway change that may outpace their companies abilities to adapt and survive. I haven’t mentioned other tactics the textbook publishing industry uses to lock-in customers and enhance value, including custom publishing, digital and web-based content.