Steal This Textbook
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jan 15, 2010 in Commentary • 7 commentseBook “piracy” had become an increasing concern for the publishing industry in recent days. Most bestsellers show up on the torrent sites pretty quickly.
The proprietary content publishers are entirely justified in being afraid. We’re going to kill them, and display their rotting corpses on our battlements.
On the P2P Research email list, Andy Robinson speculated on why this phenomenon hadn’t yet expanded to include most academic books and articles. Why don’t the pdfs you buy from J-STOR wind up on torrent sites? Why don’t people scan them in, for that matter?
Andy speculates it’s the relatively small potential readership, and the comparative ease for people in the academic community to obtain them via library J-STOR subscriptions or Interlibrary Loan.
Probably right.
What I wonder about, though, is college textbooks. it seems to me that there’d be a major demand for pirated versions given the absolutely monstrous copyright markups, and the deliberately crooked gimmicks used to circumvent competition in the used book market. Textbook authors introduce the most minor modifications each year, and then assign their own books (and their buddies’ books) as required reading.
The cost of scanning would be much lower, under these circumstances, given the possibility of a modular approach: just scanning the new material that publishers tweak old textbooks with each year. And a single download site catering to college students would probably have very high traffic.
The main obstacle would probably be finding a secure host in a country where the DMCA isn’t enforced. And once torrent files were uploaded, they’d probably be widely duplicated and circulated by other student communities, including via darknets and “sneakernet.” All the proprietary content industries floundering around with lame policies like pressuring ISPs to disconnect file-sharers is about as effective as a far in a high wind. All they do is drive encryption and anonymization into the mainstream, so that the portion of the population that appears on the ISPs’ radars shrinks like the dot on an old-fashioned picture tube.
If this happened I would absolutely rupture myself laughing at it. The way things are now, I find the local University library constantly plastered over with RIAA “Did You Know?” agitprop aimed at “educating” students about the dangers of “stealing” music. But imagine if the campus were actually owned by the RIAA. That’s pretty much what the reaction will be when students are sharing pirated textbooks and depriving the faculty of their $150 cover price?
The campus security crackdown in response would probably look like Romania in the last days of Ceaucescu–and with pretty much the same results.
So why aren’t there yet high-traffic torrent sites with “pirated” texts for freshman and sophomore courses, especially college requirements? Speaking ex cathedra from my armchair, as someone with absolutely no geek cred or tech skills whatever, I sure hope someone gets right on it.
There are a few torrents out there called like “500 engineering text books.” Too bad for me most of my books weren’t in the group.
We also need more copyright-free textbooks to be written. A useful project would be figuring out how to pay even pro-IP authors to do this.
Roderick — can you list perhaps the three to five subjects/courses you would consider highest priority? And is there a case to be made that this project would be particularly important in some way for anarchists in particular?
Roderick and Brad: There are a number of open source textbook projects out there, based on modular contributions (I think the Wiki format is popular for this kind of thing). Modular supplements or upgrades of existing text, especially, exemplify the basic principle of modular design in general: minimizing unit development costs by spreading them over as large a product ecology as possible.
One of the more notable–California’s open source textbook projects–is a statist project, but still a good illustration of such a project at work.
You can find a bunch of examples of this kind of thing by Googling “open source textbook.”
One of the OER (open education resource) sites is Connexions, which started in 1999. One of their collaborations (with the Foothills and De Anza community colleges in California) is to get college textbooks into their repository so they can be used around the world. They’re also working with a group in South Africa called Siyavula – they’re creating and submitting content for K – 12 grades. And finally they have content created by grass roots contributors at all levels.
The content is available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license, which allows end-users to do some interesting things. Certainly the modules can be translated into different languages; derivative works are allowed by the license and are easy to create, and content has already been translated into Spanish, Vietnamese, et al. The material can also be made appropriate for different grade levels; for example, an algebra text for high school students can be adapted for middle schools. Finally, everything can be kept up to date (most important for college level texts), either by suggesting updates to authors, or by the more heavy weight mechanism of “forking” (creating a derivative work). The approach is different from a wiki; works have identifiable authors who retain copyright, and release the content under this particular license. In that sense, it works more like open source software than Wikipedia.
They are taking two basic approaches to creating textbooks from their “module” components. The first is to encourage experts to create content from the bottom up; the second is to find donors who will either provide textbooks (content owners) or funding to buy textbooks.
One of things they take into account is that many students still want to have printed texts. These are typically easier to read, and people are still accustomed to marking notes in margins. To that end, they provide PDFs for personal printing (it’s all run through LaTeX so it all looks the same, but still), and some textbooks are available through a collaboration with a print-on-demand provider. The latter are edited to flow correctly and look appealing, and are available for essentially the cost of materials and shipping.
Editing and quality control are big issues for collaborative content. To facilitate the recognition of correct and high-quality works, Connexions has implemented something called the “lens”; it’s a light-weight branding available for modules and collections (textbooks). Anyone can create a lens, and mark which modules/textbooks they find compelling (they can also tag and comment in their lens). The CCOT (Community College Open Textbook project) has a lens in Connexions; so does IEEE. The content in their lenses should be expected to be high quality. Independent school districts, state boards, and other entities could also create lenses and influence the adoption of various texts in that fashion. Check out NCPEA’s lens as well.
Textbooks as emergent phenomena require a lot of contributions exercising a wide range of talents. Open source software is still acquiring documentation, translations, tutorials, better packaging, etc., in fits and starts; textbooks will need to follow a similar curve. Quality content in a repository like Connexions will encourage more visitors and more contributors; maybe Kevin should consider adding his texts to the mix, and see how they get adopted from there?
I feel I should also respond to the post itself.
The suggestion that the market power of the textbook publishers can be broken by a coördinated effort to scan and electronically distribute copies of their books is debatable, and I think this is not a reasonable course of action. It’s likely the effects may run counter to what you might intend. It’s also a recommendation to break the law, which I can’t condone anyway.
Why would a massive effort to copy textbooks be counter-productive? A wide scale disregard for copyright would undermine (for example) the Free Software ecology; the enforced sharing inherent in “copy-left” licenses such as the GNU General Public License requires the respect of the rights of the authors and copyright holders in the relevant software. Without such protection, such gifts to the community could be appropriated by publishers who would benefit from the value without contributing anything to the community in return. In another example, the works here at C4SS are published to the readers under a Creative Commons “By Attribution” license, which means you can use the work however you like as long as you credit the author(s). The academic ecosystem relies on reputation, and attribution is a crucial component of that calculation. A disregard for copyrights would undermine these and related sharing based environments.
Another objection arises from economics. When textbook publishers lose revenue because of illegal copying, they can to some (large?) extent recoup the loss by increasing prices on legitimate textbook purchasers because there are as yet no alternatives to their products. An example comes from computer operating systems: it isn’t massive copying or “piracy” alone which makes Microsoft worried about their hegemony, it’s the presence of alternatives to MS-Windows. As long as there were no viable alternatives to using MS-Windows (remember the 1990s), Microsoft could take advantage of their monopoly position to raise prices to maintain their profit margins despite “piracy”, and their corporate and legitimate end users had no choice but to pay the rents. Now that Apple is increasing its market share, Linux is taking over data centers and desktops, and distributors like Lenovo and Dell are pre-installing Ubuntu on computers, Microsoft faces an upper bound on what customers are willing to pay for their software, which makes piracy a much more potent threat to their revenues. I suggest that it’s far more effective for people to support and contribute to open education resources such as Connexions than to spend time scanning and distributing copyrighted texts on the internet. Once there is real competition in the textbook space, the publishers will start worrying about their rotting corpses [being displayed] on [our] battlements. Until then, the publishers can figure out alternate ways to extract revenue from students: mandatory textbook fees per student from universities? Textbook rentals instead of sales (like K-12 schools)? Higher textbook prices? etc.
I believe readers should look for open source textbooks, wiki books, and open education efforts such as Connexions to participate in. Having valuable peer-produced texts to use in education will start the process of forcing the textbook publishers to change their profit model to survive. I don’t think it’s worth the effort to scan and distribute textbooks; all that will do is convince textbook publishers to adopt the RIAA approach. Far better to have publishers react as IBM did to free software: figure out how to make money by providing added value, either with improvements to the products, or in associated services.
Luigi: I doubt many of the homefolks here at C4SS share your reluctance to break the law, but to each his own.
I know that licensing schemes like Creative Commons are piggybacked on copyright law. But again, I suspect that for most of us here the CC license is not an end in itself, but rather simply an attempt to mimic the state of affairs that would exist without any copyright law at all. The free culture movement uses things like CC, the GPL, etc., in self-defense, to prevent material in the public domain from being appropriated by copyright and removed from the common. So if there weren’t any copyright law to defend ourselves against, we wouldn’t need it. Our goal is to make copyright unenforceable and destroy the proprietary content business model.
In the interim, I don’t care if publishers profit by using material under open licenses without adhering to the licensing requirements. After all, I don’t believe in “intellectual property.” The main point of CC, for me, is that no matter what use they make of it they can’t use it as a pretext to sue *us* for infringement because the license covers our asses.