Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjackson2012 | Hacker News Reader

kjackson2012

I'm not generally someone that supports illegal acts, but I fully support pirating/copying of textbooks. The fact that textbook publishing companies have a virtual monopoly and then do other things like coerce professors to continuously force students to use yearly new editions of textbooks makes me believe that the only solution is to pirate their material and starve them of money.

Sorry that some good textbook authors are affected by this, but frankly, there is a bigger issue here, and collateral damage is to be expected. The only solution is to charge fair prices, and until that point is reached, I believe students should pirate textbooks to their hearts content.

View on HN

If there was some way writers could license out their work to multiple publishers that could create competition. Alas, as far as I know, a publisher won't touch a textbook without exclusivity.

Why not cut out the publishers entirely? Have university professors write textbooks, and have university libraries archive and distribute those textbooks electronically. We live in an age of cheap eink screens and cheap printing -- so what purpose do textbook publishers serve these days?

University professors don't have the time or skills to create diagrams, locate pictures, handle formatting and typesetting issues, write hundreds of homework problems and solutions, proofread, copyedit, and all the other things that go into producing good textbooks.

"University professors don't have the time"

Really? I know professors who wrote textbooks in their spare time. Universities could give professors a paid year off (no teaching responsibilities) to work on textbooks. Time is a non-issue here.

"...or skills to create diagrams..."

Professors, who spend their time writing research papers that are usually filled with diagrams, don't have the skills to do so? That's an interesting assertion. There are plenty of software tools available for creating diagrams.

"handle formatting and typesetting issues"

Hm, I think there is a tool for that one too: LaTeX. What, it's too much to expect a professor to know how to use LaTeX? Well, there are several other tools that could be used. These problems were more or less solved decades ago. Professors routinely format and typeset their articles; formatting a book is not substantially different.

"write hundreds of homework problems"

I know professors who do this: they write homework and test problems for their courses.

Really, I think you underestimate what an experienced professor could do in a year. Even if what you were saying was true, it would not be hard to solve: universities could hire experts on formatting and publishing to work in their libraries and assist professors. It is also not necessarily the case that every professor would have to write whole books; if books were being shared by universities via their libraries, professors could make corrections and improvements to books as needed, with the changes being propagated in a manner similar to patches in open source projects. We have all the technology that is needed for this, we only need to put in the effort to organize such a system (but I won't hold my breath).

I've had many teachers write their own books and give them to the local copy-shop for distribution to the students at printing cost (~$15). Or we can keep PDF copies of the books for free.

Universities could give professors a paid year off

At whose expense? Taxpayers and the students themselves, of course. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

On top of that, there is no sense going against the specialization of labor. Better leave the professionals (in this case, the publishing companies) to do their thing.

So for a small increase in their tuition, students would be getting free textbooks, or for a small increase in taxes (or just not spending so much on the military), society would be getting free textbooks. In what version of the universe are these negative things?

As for the "professionals" at the publishing companies, what exactly is their profession? We do not need publishers to copy books for us anyone, because we have computers that can copy the books faster, cheaper, and on a much greater scale and if students need printers, they have access to them. So what professionals would you be referring to? Textbook publishing companies are not academies where experts in a subject spend their days writing about that subject; universities are the academies where experts (i.e. professors and researchers) are paid to write about their area of expertise. Textbook publishing companies hire people who can make fancy covers (which adds no value to books), double check typesetting (which is a redundant task, since librarians and professors can do that), and operate machines that print and bind books (but we do not need that anymore, because we have automated ways to distribute books). So in what way are we "going against the specialization of labor" by asking for books that are CC-SA licensed, written by professors, and shared over the Internet?

I don't think it's correct that professors don't do their own diagrams and typesetting for academic works. Sometimes they do. The complaints I hear are that the publisher screwed up the equations and introduced errors, not that they thoughtfully corrected their work and enhanced it.

When diagrams and typesetting are needed though, this is the perfect task for the students to attend to. I'm seeing this right now in the free online classes at Coursera and Udacity - teachers publish notes in lectures and students are providing transcriptions, translations, diagrams, deeper explanations, and overall creating massive improvement on the originals, in many cases creating an online textbook in pdf or wiki format.

That's what grad students are for.

My wife and I both have been in multiple courses where either the professor or another at the university wrote the text book. Some weren't so great, but more than a few were outstanding.

Berkeley's eecs department does this. Almost none of the classes have required textbooks, and the prof make sure to mention this on the first lecture so you still have time to return them if you've bought them. They still list the textbooks as references, though, since they may come in handy (eg: [1]). Of course, the book is on reserve in the university library, so even then you don't need to buy it.

Instead of required text books they have lecture notes for most of the classes that are provided free on the website that might as well be a textbook considering how thorough they are (eg: [2]). One or two intro classes had a reader version of the lecture notes, but that was well over 1000 pages, and again, not required since it was provided free on the course website.

For the few classes that did have required textbooks, most of them were books that had been out for at least 3-5 years, so used copies were easily available (eg sicp, K&R C, Vazirani's algorithms, etc.). For the very few classes that had textbooks with a recent version the profs mentioned in the first lecture that the old versions would work fine, but that the students would have to figure out where the assigned reading was if the chapters didn't match up exactly.

[1]: "There is no required textbook for this course, since none is altogether satisfactory, and all tend to be ridiculously expensive. Officially, we'll rely on notes that I provide (on paper and on the web), but many people feel more comfortable if they can supplement this information with other treatments. You might want to take a look at the following books:

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman—also known as "The Red Dragon Book". You won't need the latest edition.

At least one student recommends Thinking in C++, by Bruce Eckel, which you can download by clicking here.

Python Essential Reference (3rd edition) by David M. Beazley. This is also on-line (see the bar on the left) and at bookstores, on-line and otherwise." - http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/fa12/info.html

[2]: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/fa12/notes/notes.pdf

My elective courses are chosen almost entirely by which books I can pirate. At the beginning of the semester, I fire up uTorrent, and start browsing around. If I can find the text book a course uses, then BAM, I'm taking that course.

It's the only thing I pirate these days, and I know its wrong, but I would be lying if I said it didn't feel like victory.

A course requiring 4 books, and using only 1/10th of each one is beyond frustrating.

Textbook publishing companies are legal. They might be unethical (or that's your opinion), but they are operate legally.

Piracy is illegal.

You are complaining about an unethical company and solving the problem by doing an illegal action. Isn't this selfish?

"You are complaining about an unethical company and solving the problem by doing an illegal action. Isn't this selfish?"

No, it is called "civil disobedience" and it is one of the few effective nonviolent ways to promote change. Further, the law is completely out of alignment is this regard; it is in no way promoting the progress of science or useful arts, nor is it helping to ensure that a needed industry remain solvent. We do not need the textbook publishing industry, because we have a much faster, cheaper, and effective way to distribute textbooks: the Internet. If the law continues to protect these unethical and laughably anachronistic businesses, then the law itself is wrong.

Civil disobedience is a public protest and has been about being willing to go to jail in protest of unjust laws. It is critical that the authorities are aware that you break the laws and you are available to be arrested. People then become outraged at the injustice of your imprisonment, or so you hope.

Sitting at home downloading stuff and then posting about it using an anonymous handle is not civil disobedience.

Slavery at one point was unethical yet legal. Do you consider the people who ran the underground railroad selfish?

Maybe the problem is not copyrighting itself, but that the US education system is entirely a rip-off? The copyrighted books not touched by the educational hoax are pretty cheap.

I'm not sure I see the correlation between copyright and the value of US education system. Can you clarify?

The bubble in college textbook prices is related to the bubble in tuition costs etc, which are both driven by the easy student loans.

Individually for a student it is pretty justified to use pirated educational books, because the students are clearly being ripped off. But just turning this into another anti-copyright campaign is not the right thing to do.

So your solution is for them to charge fair prices? While we are fixing prices, I suggest we also fix the prices of DeBeers diamonds to appropriate market value. Then why stop there? Lets have the government set the prices of all overpriced commodities, including outrageous salaries. Someone's already beat you to this idea though, it's called communism.

There is no "market" for textbooks. Professors assign a single textbook, and students are forced to buy it. If a class could somehow allow for different textbooks would allow students to pay for cheaper textbooks and create price competition. But it's hard to do in practice if not impossible.

I didn't say they should mandate a fixed price. I said the book publishers should charge a fair price, one that decreases the amount of pirating because it's low enough so that it's not worth it for students to pirate. That's up to them. Until they do, I fully support pirating of textbooks.

Professors assign a single textbook, and students are forced to buy it.

No one put a gun on your head to go to that college. You took this decision and then you must be responsible for the costs of tuition, housing, books... Inform yourself well of the college and professors before enrolling too.

I also fully agree with pirating textbooks. I'm still at university and require books every now and then. Just the other night I needed access to a book that hasn't been published as an e-book and was $105/£65 if I even had enough time to get it from Amazon. So I downloaded it from a popular torrent site.

>it's called communism

No it isn't, but thanks for the 1970s propaganda flashback. If the government is setting prices that private producers are bound by, then that's some form of socialist/capitalist mixed economy. If it were communism, the means of producing textbooks, diamonds, etc. would be publicly owned in the first place. That is, DeBeers wouldn't even exist unless it were some kind of state appendage.

It's funny, because intellectual "property" is actually the opposite of real property: a state-mandated monopoly, long ago useful because it only was for a few years (and it only mattered to publishers who owned presses), but now a hindrance after decades of lobbying for extensions.

I wouldn't call that communist, but it's not a free economy either.

Who's the biggest state-run-economy advocate, I wonder?

the government ability to set prices for another corporation makes it a little bit less like a corporation, and a little bit more like a government run "Ministry of diamonds" agency. Governments dictating prices of textbooks would be a step toward communism. After they set they diamond prices, then next up on the agenda is to set employee salaries at fair prices.

>the government ability to set prices for another corporation makes it a little bit less like a corporation, and a little bit more like a government run

There is nothing inherent in the definition of corporation saying that corporations are 'more corporatey' when left unrestricted by an external legal system. In fact the only way a corporation (a legal entity) can exist is within a legal framework. That is, corporations can't exist without being regulated into existence.

>Governments dictating prices of textbooks would be a step toward communism

No, if anything it would be shifting the socialism/capitalism balance towards the former. Regulating a market price isn't making a claim on ownership of the means of production, and so has nothing to do with communism.

The US government sets price floors on almost every crop produced in the country. Nobody claims this to be communism or a step towards communism, because it isn't. Price guarantees are a transfer of wealth from non farm-owning taxpayers to farm owners, which is an economic policy rooted in socialism. Price-setting for textbooks or diamonds would also be a policy rooted in socialism.

If your argument is that any socialist policy inevitably leads to communism, then I don't know what to tell you. Do you really think the USG has communism in mind as an end goal?

Good grief, get over yourself. There are not communists lurking under every rock trying to grab your ankles, FFS.

The solution to piracy is for the publishers to charge fair prices. In other places such as the UK where textbooks are sensibly priced, there is almost no incentive for piracy and people are far more inclined to buy the text from a bookstore than used.

But he never mentioned government intervention. He suggested that students vote with their wallets, and since they can't decide to purchase another textbook (as one would do in a typical market, which the textbook market isn't), the solution is to pirate.

The problem is that the market has been compromised such that fair price discovery isn't happening.

Interesting you bring up DeBeers. I suppose you assert that the global diamond market is healthy as well?

Textbooks and Diamonds are in the same boat. Free Market supply and demand has been subverted in favour of entities controlling the entire market and setting the prices where the consumers are powerless to punish waste and corruption by selecting an alternative book.

A solution would be to make sure that Colleges have to pay for half of the price of student books, and put it into Tuition. That way when students see the inflated tuition prices (due to lots of $300 books), they go with the other college that has book prices that are reasonable.

It's a nifty switcheroo to charge students tuition, then say "you are responsible for buying the books, and by the way you don't have a choice in the books."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com