A torrent of textbooks

Posted Tuesday, 29 July 2008, 02:08 HST @422

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.

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Tuesday, 29 July 2008 at 10:55 HST @788 Jura Stanaityte

I can only dream that in just 10 years, youngsters will not remember the dark era of rooms overcrowded by books, the sad era before Golden Shellback waterproof TechCrunch Web Tablet...
Wednesday, 30 July 2008 at 12:52 HST @869 Bill Sodeman

It's starting to sound like bad science fiction, isn't it? :)
Saturday, 2 August 2008 at 19:17 HST @137 Tim Hoeck

these people are as bad as RIAA.. the revolution is now, if you don't adjust, you'll be left behind. There is no reason to have to carry around 5 or so huge textbooks, when many students already have laptops, or eReaders for that matter.
Monday, 4 August 2008 at 18:10 HST @090 Bill Sodeman

Tim, you'll get no arguments from me. Distributed scanning models have made textbook torrents practical for years. The book publishers can't change their models without some serious pain. it's a lot like the CD-MP3 conversion in the 90s.