Things that aren't pirated, and that's surprising.

[tehweave]

I'll just put this here: The following is not advocating piracy, it is simply using the idea of piracy as a jumping off point for discussion of people who do it. I do not want people to be pirates, but we should feel free to talk about it.

Done? Good.

Now then, here's the actual question: Why are college textbooks not pirated? Of all the things that are grossly overpriced, music, video games, and movies don't hold anything to college textbooks. You're paying hundreds of dollars on three books that you'll refer to for 4 months and then thats it. You'll never look at them again, and every college professor REQUIRES you to buy them and put yourself in further debt with your student loans. (This is talking from an American academic standpoint.)

So with people figuring out how to get entire movies and songs on their hard drive for free, why do students not try pirating textbooks as well? Is it apathy or do students take academia so seriously? (and not the RIAA, MPAA, ESRB, etc.)

Opinions? Arguments? What do you think?

 

[Gigano]

They're not digital?

Scanning such books would take a lot of work, and the audience for them would be comparatively small. So uploading to central hub would be out of the question, though I have no doubt they're copied locally and physically on a scanner/printer to an unknown extent.

Plus, at least quite often our professors are the one's who wrote the book, so I don't know if it would look all that great in class not having a physical copy to ever show. Especially when studying law...

 

[Aqualung]

...?

My friend pirated all his school textbooks in biology and chemistry.

While I paid $700+ for mine...

They do pirate books, I guess it just isn't as big of a problem.

 

[zfactor]

We can rent books at my school for a fraction of the price. Or sell them back for almost the entire amount you paid to begin with. Or buy some online for $50. So not a probelm where I am...

 

[Danish rage]

Education is a battle to come out on top in some parts of the world, especially with the worldwide unemployment. I guess thats why.

 

[Blind Sight]

Now then, here's the actual question: Why are college textbooks not pirated?

I've wondered this since my first year of university, I could save a lot of money not buying textbooks that I barely open that the university buys back from me for 20% of the original price.

That, and academic articles, I could do research WAY faster if someone set up a 'Pirata Academia' or something, a lot of scholarly search engines demand I pay five bucks or more to view the whole article. When you're making a bibliography with 15-20 sources, that's just cruel. Especially when so many profs are Nazis about internet sources, it's really hard to find decent internet sources when they're either costly or the prof refuses to accept any '.html' source. Ah well, that's what JSTOR and Scholar's Portal is for.

Scanning such books would take a lot of work, and the audience for them would be comparatively small.

I'm not so sure about that, a lot of university students would definitely use it to save money. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if university professors started encouraging people so that they'd actually LOOK at the textbook at least once that semester.

 

[shadow_pirate22]

My friend was ready to shell out $300+ for his textbooks for the quarter, and realized, he can just buy a Kindle for $140 and download all his books for cheap. When you get your books for about $1 each, illegally downloading them just seems like an unnecessary hassle.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is books themselves.

I don't know about you, but I find 'digital' books to be a real pain in the ass compared to an actual printed book.
In this is even more noticeable with something like a textbook. (trust me, I have a few things like this. They're freely available, not pirated, but they illustrate the inconvenience of digital textbooks)

Maybe if electronic paper / e-readers were better/ more readily available this would be different.

But as it stands, digital books are just, well, annoying.

And what happens if you try and print a textbook out?

Well, ever tried printing a 1000 page book?

My printer is out of ink after about 300 pages or so.

So, doing that would cost me about 3 ink cartridges, plus 1 whole ream of paper.

That adds up to about 3 x £14 + £5 or about £50

That's easily $75-100 if you take the differences in currencies into account.

And the last time I bought a textbook it was only about £35 anyway, so it would cost me more to print my own copy than to just buy the damn thing anyway.

Book piracy just isn't economically worth doing...

And sticking with purely digital books is just too irritating.

 

[Hashime]

I'll just put this here: The following is not advocating piracy, it is simply using the idea of piracy as a jumping off point for discussion of people who do it. I do not want people to be pirates, but we should feel free to talk about it.

Done? Good.

Now then, here's the actual question: Why are college textbooks not pirated? Of all the things that are grossly overpriced, music, video games, and movies don't hold anything to college textbooks. You're paying hundreds of dollars on three books that you'll refer to for 4 months and then thats it. You'll never look at them again, and every college professor REQUIRES you to buy them and put yourself in further debt with your student loans. (This is talking from an American academic standpoint.)

So with people figuring out how to get entire movies and songs on their hard drive for free, why do students not try pirating textbooks as well? Is it apathy or do students take academia so seriously? (and not the RIAA, MPAA, ESRB, etc.)

Opinions? Arguments? What do you think?

oh, they are. I saved $400 using .pdf versions of my books.

 

[Lilani]

College textbooks are not usually pirated because:

1. There are so many, most of which are not available in digital form. Even if a few can be found in digital, there are too many that aren't to put a major dent in the system.

2. Textbooks update and get revised, sometimes once every year or two. Pirated materials would have to constantly be updated to remain relevant, which is a lot of work.

3. Textbooks in general work best in physical format to most. I know I'm that way. Also, many are workbooks that you're required to work from as well as read from.

4. It is a MAJOR pain for someone without specialized equipment or inside data to put a physical book into pirated form. With CDs, it's easy. Just rip in iTunes, play with the format, and voila. Music for the masses. Textbooks would be a page-by-page sort of thing. WAY too much work to be worth it.

 

[Starke]

Now then, here's the actual question: Why are college textbooks not pirated?

I've wondered this since my first year of university, I could save a lot of money not buying textbooks that I barely open that the university buys back from me for 20% of the original price.

That, and academic articles, I could do research WAY faster if someone set up a 'Pirata Academia' or something, a lot of scholarly search engines demand I pay five bucks or more to view the whole article. When you're making a bibliography with 15-20 sources, that's just cruel. Especially when so many profs are Nazis about internet sources, it's really hard to find decent internet sources when they're either costly or the prof refuses to accept any '.html' source.

Some of that involves the amount of maintenance that goes into maintaining one of those databases.

That said, my campus picks up the tab for ProQuest and Eubesco, and I will miss those when I leave here.

 

[Starke]

My friend was ready to shell out $300+ for his textbooks for the quarter, and realized, he can just buy a Kindle for $140 and download all his books for cheap. When you get your books for about $1 each, illegally downloading them just seems like an unnecessary hassle.

...huh... I never thought of that...

EDIT: Doesn't matter, none of my assigned reading is available for Kindle.

 

[Rofl-Mayo]

Maybe some people just don't think about it. I never even thought about it until now.

 

[Fleaman]

My roommate realized basically everything OP just said in our first year at college. First, you look for .pdfs and online viewers; there's a site in particular we used that also featured user-provided solutions for book problems (the name escapes me just now...). If you can't find any, you can often get used books on the cheap off of craigslist, which is also where you should go when you're done with yours. I know that at least the University of Florida has a thriving used book black market.

The reason piracy doesn't happen more often than it does is probably because most of your thickest textbooks (usually for your gen ed classes, like psychology 1, physics, etc) are "revised" every one or two years, and I don't know if there's some racket behind this but colleges pretty much always require the latest edition for classes. Protip: They're not actually revised; changes typicially consist of switching around the numbers and order of problems, to which more than one of my professors would scan the problems from the latest edition and post them on the class website so we didn't all have to pay for the new edition.