A torrent of textbooks

by billso on Tuesday, 29 July 2008

As we approach the start of the aca­d­e­mic year, the ris­ing cost of almost every­thing has cre­ated a surge of inter­est in elec­tronic books, in legal and unli­censed versions.

As we’ve dis­cussed in ear­lier billso.com arti­cles, col­lege text­books are expen­sive. Ris­ing oil prices have fueled steep price increases for new books, and have dri­ven up the prices of used textbooks.

In April 2008, Sage, Oxford and Cam­bridge recently sued four admin­is­tra­tors at Geor­gia State Uni­ver­sity. The pub­lish­ers believed that dig­i­tal course packs assem­bled by fac­ulty and posted to uni­ver­sity servers vio­lated the pub­lish­ers’ copy­right claims, as no licenses had been pur­chased for the arti­cles or text­book chap­ters included in these down­loads. This New York Times arti­cle called Pub­lish­ers Sue Geor­gia State on Dig­i­tal Read­ing Mat­ter the Chron­i­cle of Higher Education’s arti­cle Pub­lish­ers Sue Geor­gia State U. for Copy­right Infringe­ment have addi­tional details.

Mean­while, one of the largest oper­a­tors of col­lege book­stores has pur­chased an e-publishing com­pany. Fol­lett believes that Cafe­Scribe will become a dom­i­nant player in col­lege e-book pub­lish­ing, by help­ing stu­dents and fac­ulty self-publish their mate­ri­als in a social net­work­ing envi­ron­ment while offer­ing elec­tronic ver­sions of printed text­books. See this Will the Cafe­Scribe Acqui­si­tion Give a Boost to Elec­tronic Text­books? for an inter­view with CafeScribe’s CEO, Bryce Johnson.

Text­book pub­lish­ers have reluc­tantly adopted e-book and web-based pub­lish­ing tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing mul­ti­ple types of dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment (DRM). Some sys­tems require stu­dents to log on or access the dig­i­tal book from one spe­cific com­puter. Other sys­tems check for mul­ti­ple ses­sions logged in with iden­ti­cal usernames.

Some pub­lish­ers bun­dle web site access with new copies of their books. A coupon is included with the book, includ­ing a sub­scrip­tion code that gives the pur­chas­ing stu­dent 3 to 6 months of access to a com­pan­ion web site that may include addi­tional read­ings, exer­cises, down­loads and stream­ing media. The coupon is use­less after it’s used, so pur­chasers of the used book have to find their own access to the com­pan­ion web site, or do with­out that material.

Scan­ning the material

Dig­i­tal sys­tems help pub­lish­ers reduce their costs, but stu­dents con­tinue to find way to break or defeat these sys­tems. Cre­at­ing a scanned text­book can be a labor-intensive task, but it’s man­age­able when the work is dis­trib­uted among a group of peo­ple. The paper for­mat of a book has been a mild form of phys­i­cal rights man­age­ment (PRM). There’s more dis­cus­sion in this New York Times arti­cle called First It Was Song Down­loads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

The scanned book is a col­lec­tion of high-resolution image files, in which each page is cap­tured as a sin­gle image file. Pages can be color cor­rected so that the final col­lec­tion has nat­ural ren­di­tions of the textbook’s col­ors. While this is triv­ial for a book that is entirely text, many col­lege text­books use mul­ti­ple fonts, col­ors, images and call­outs to engage the reader.

The image files are num­bered in sequen­tial order and cem­bed­ded into PDF files. If there are addi­tional down­loads or scereen cap­tures from the com­pan­ion web­site or opti­cal disks, these files and the images can be com­pressed into a mas­sive ZIP or RAR file.

In the past, the size of the file was a bar­rier to dis­tri­b­u­tion. The wide­spread avail­abil­ity of broad­band Inter­net access, along with mas­sive, inex­pen­sive hard dri­ves, have dri­ven down the aver­age student’s costs of text­book piracy.

Encrypt­ing the Internet

Peer-to-peer (P2P) net­works are a pop­u­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion point for unli­censed, scanned ver­sions of col­lege textbooks. 

ISPs and copy­right hold­ers have devel­oped elab­o­rate sys­tems to mon­i­tor and dis­rupt P2P net­works. the Bit­Tor­rent pro­to­col includes encryp­tion sup­port, to help users hide the con­tents of their packets. This newsteevee.com arti­cle called The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Inter­net describes how one of the most pop­u­lar P2P sites, Sweden’s The Pirate Bay, has pro­posed noth­ing less than a new encryp­tion pro­to­col to pro­tect Inter­net traf­fic while in transit.

Trans­par­ent end-to-end encryp­tion for the Inter­nets or IPETEE could be installed as an appli­ca­tion or dri­ver in the client’s oper­at­ing sys­tem, allow­ing any and every net-aware appli­ca­tion on the com­puter to con­nect with encrypted peers and servers. Of course, ISPs could still detect the pat­terns and quan­tity of traf­fic com­ing from an encrypted client, and throt­tle or shut down the client’s bandwidth.

In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I’m a chap­ter edi­tor on a text­book that is sched­uled for 2010. It’s called Man­ag­ing Through Col­lab­o­ra­tion. I’ve also pub­lished a chap­ter in another text­book, and I was a con­tribut­ing author on a Sybex CIW Foun­da­tions book in 2002. See the billso.com books page for more details.

Related arti­cles and pages on billso.com

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Tagged as: BitTorrent, copyright, economy, encryption, fair-use, network, oil, privacy, publishing, revenue, social, textbook, university, USA

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