Texbook Torrents

This has been previously published on ITToolbox here and this raises some seriously interesting questions about colleges, text books, and the culture of free sharing. Not sure if this is good, bad, or ugly.

With the high cost of textbooks, there is no surprise that a group has gotten together to develop and deliver a torrent site that deals with nothing but college text books.

Textbook torrents starts off on legally dubious grounds, but that is also highly likely not going to stop the explosion of this web site. It is not about student’s spending money on books, it is really about folks getting something for free, and in this case it is college text books. This is interesting because most of the colleges that I interact with on a daily basis have an e-resource process where the college text books can be downloaded for free by the students. Of course it comes with Adobe DRM, but in general, if you want an e-book, you can get it for free from the college. Or not really free, e-resources are built into the cost of the class, and you pay for them even if you don’t use them.

A note on the Torrent Textbooks site says that Pearson Education (one of the major suppliers of text books) issued a C&D (Cease and Desist) note to the web site which they honored. But in light of other torrent sites being forced to turn over IIS/Apache logs and user information they state with a well deserved bit of paranoia

This is not a happy day, but I want to take the opportunity to make a few comments. First, I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to prevent the server’s logs from falling into the hands of those that might use them against you. If that means bankrupting myself in the process, so be it. I would prefer that it not come to that, but I have drawn a line which I will not cross no matter the cost. In the next few days, I will be drafting an agreement that all users must accept in order to continue using the site. This will be mutual in nature, with both parties agreeing to abide by certain guidelines and to uphold certain responsibilities. It will hopefully put us all in a more comfortable legal position. Source: TextbookTorrents.com

Right now any bittorrent site that deals with any pirated information is in trouble, frankly they would have been better off making a subgroup at The Pirate Bay rather than striking out on their own. Expect the shut down very soon, or the raid by the textbook police.

Publishers are in new ground with people sharing book torrents; they have not generally taken the uber aggressive stances that the RIAA and MPAA have in the past. But if Textbook Torrents takes off, this might be the straw that starts the brutal backlash lawsuit frenzy ala RIAA/MPAA tactics.

So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove individual files. “We’ve just tried to keep sweeping away these infringements as they continue to come online,” he said. Source: Chronicle.com

In all it is a good thing that the publishers have not gone after individual downloader’s, but as time moves on and this problem gets worst, maybe the book publishers will try something different. Co-opt, subscription services, anything would be better than the strong arm tactics that torrent users have seen in the past. This is not likely to go away, what will be interesting is to see how the publishers attempt to work with sites in the future.

Tags: textbook torrents, download, textbook, bittorrent, pearson, downloads, money, college, education, infringement