Pirating textbooks isn’t just against the law, it’s a good idea, too
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 10 years ago, in 2014, on the World Wide Web.
Here’s a recent story from the Washington Post, informing us that More students are illegally downloading college textbooks for free.
Shared Article from Washington Post
More students are illegally downloading college textbooks for fr…
Students upload them (also illegally) to help others save money.
washingtonpost.com
It's hard (if not impossible) to know just how prevalent this practice is, but some college students around the country are uploading their expensive college textbooks onto the Internet so other students can download them for free and avoid the hefty fees that are sometimes more than $200 a book.
Vocativ.com has a story titled "Why College Students are Stealing Their Textbooks," which notes that some students are even downloading them for ethics classes.
The cost to students of college textbooks skyrocketed 82 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a 2013 report by the U.S. General Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress. As a result, students have been looking for less expensive options, such as renting books — and, now, finding them on the Internet, uploaded by other students.
In August, an organization called the Book Industry Study Group, which represents publishers, retailers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, librarians and others in the industry, released a survey of some 1,600 students and found, according to a release on the data, that "students continue to become more sophisticated in acquiring their course materials at the lowest cost as illicit and alternative acquisition behaviors, from scanned copies to illegal downloads to the use of pirated websites, continue to increase in frequency."
–Valerie Strauss, More students are illegally downloading college textbooks for free
Washington Post, 17 September 2014.
Well, good. The textbook industry is an obscene racket, predicated on extraordinary costs and a maze of perverse incentives, controlled by a tightly organized cartel of copyright-monopolists, gargantuan institutional sellers and gargantuan institutional buyers, throwing every ton of their incredible weight onto the shoulders of students, tollgating and massively hampering the dissemination of knowledge.
Pirating textbooks isn’t just a good idea. It’s a mitzvah. Burn the domming industry to the ground. Knowledge can and should be free.
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It is interesting that the slug of the Vocativ.com article implies that the headline probably started off as “Lots of students simply stopped paying for textbooks” but then some editor changed it to use the aggressive “stealing” (and probably selecting the flipping-off image). I wonder if that editor never borrowed or shared a textbook in college, or borrowed or lent some other book in his/her professional career.
“which notes that some students are even downloading them for ethics classes.”
all the more appropriate.