While online music piracy has been prevalent since the late 1990s, a new ilk is emerging that affects publishers and college students everywhere: textbook piracy.
With the cost of textbooks on the rise, financially strapped students are looking for ways to cut expenses. This is typically accomplished by purchasing used and discounted textbooks at the Bookstore or shopping through online vendors, as well as borrowing the books from the library. "Though there is a high cost of education overall, even $1,000 spent on textbooks is a small amount when compared to the actual cost of tuition," said Fred Yen, a professor at Boston College Law School. Despite this, college campuses across the country have garnered national media attention due to an increase of textbook piracy.
TextbookTorrents.com, which went online in January 2007, currently has over 97,000 members - a membership that has increased over 20 percent since August 2008. Additionally, recent numbers show that the Web site attracts over 180,000 visitors each week. The Web site's administrator, who goes by the alias "Geekman," said in an e-mail, "Traffic has definitely been increasing, particularly over the last few months. We have approximately 1,000 new registrations per day." He said the recent boost in traffic is probably due to the time of year and recent media attention. "We are experiencing unprecedented numbers of registrations and general site activity."
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has intervened and sent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices to the Web site's hosts, causing it to go offline. These actions, however, have been to little avail, as Geekman and crew are able to get the site back up and running within a few days. Textbook Torrents also has contingency plans in place for future actions taken against it.
"Despite their wishes, publishers will never be able to have a world devoid of piracy - like it or not, there is going to be a certain amount of it going on," Yen said.
In addition to threatening the site with legal action, Yen said that the AAP would be able to sue individual uploaders and downloaders if they cared to, though he was unaware of any such cases. "They don't seem to be interested in going after individuals at this point," Geekman said.
Yen also spoke of the differences between music and textbook piracy. "While the most popular textbooks are probably available online, it is much easier to upload music on the Internet than for someone to scan in a 1000-page book and upload that - it is impossible to casually upload a textbook, you must be really dedicated," he said. Despite the inherent difficulty of uploading a textbook to the Internet, many scanned books are finding their way online. "We do have some users that are very committed to scanning and uploading new material," Geekman said.
Additionally, textbook piracy is unlikely to reach the heights of music piracy due to the connection between the user and the media. "People who are sharing music do it because they love it and want to spread it. I doubt that people have the same relationship with their textbooks," Yen said.
An argument against textbook piracy is that the people who spend time putting the texts together are not compensated for their work. "Good textbooks take a lot of time to prepare, and I would encourage students to think through carefully what types of materials would be available if they were all free," Yen said. Without a financial incentive, authors might be less likely to pursue publishing textbooks and further propagating their expert knowledge.
The textbook piracy community recognizes this paradox. "What we're doing isn't sustainable, but it makes a point that needs to be made: the current system is broken," Geekman said. "I know that few academics actually make a living off their work for publishers. Most seem to see it as an academic duty, without significant personal financial benefit, which begs the question of just who we are really paying."
To put textbook piracy into perspective, Textbook Torrents tracks roughly 25,000 peers at a given time. The Pirate Bay, a Web site that bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker," offers torrents of more popular media like music and movies. The Pirate Bay tracks over 12 million peers at a given time, a peer defined as one person uploading or downloading one torrent; someone uploading four torrents and downloading six counts as 10.
Textbook piracy seems to have had little effect on the BC campus thus far. Most students are unaware that it even exists, and those who have heard of it are not participating. "I've heard of books - novels - being pirated, but never textbooks. Typically it's music and movies," said Paris Hill, A&S '12.
Yen said, "I have not heard anything about it at BC."
Be the first to comment on this article!