[p2p-research] lightfoot book sharing ?

[Kevin Carson]

On 12/29/09, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

What's a bit weird is that academic and research-related works
> vary rarely appear in this way - despite widespread digitisation of journals
> and of many of the more recent books.  In principle it would be fairly easy,
> though rather time-consuming, for someone with access to go through all the
> back-issues of a journal to which they have access, grab copies of all the
> articles, and put them up in a bundle on bittorrent; or to copy page-by-page
> a book on ebrary or similar, to which they have complete access, and put it
> up similarly; or failing these, to use a scanner to make a copy of a book
> and then make it available.  There may be technical issues but not
> particularly difficult ones.  (To my knowledge most of the digitised
> versions are not copy-protected, at least nothing that a screenshot capture
> program can't beat, and the PDFs from journal sites are straightforwardly
> copiable, though someone doing this on a wide enough scale may have to be
> careful with whether things have identifying information embedded in them
> which would allow copyright owners to trace the source of the distributed
> copy).
>
> I suspect the reason it isn't done is threefold: easy-enough availability
> for most people who need them via library subscriptions and interlibrary
> loans, limited demand among people who don't have access (i.e. who aren't
> university lecturers, research students or hangers-on with university
> library access), and likely low rates of demand making ongoing torrents hard
> to sustain.  One way I could see demand rising, is if someone took the time
> to collect a lot of works on a similar topic, such as to build up a fairly
> comprehensive library, and then put the whole thing up as a single file -
> hence saving potential users the time in gathering readings as well as
> acquiring them.  That it hasn't happened, I think has to do with the
> potential number of people interested being a lot lower than for (say)
> bundles of popular sci-fi novels or complete works of bestselling authors.

I wonder, specifically, about torrent sites for 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.  The cost of scanning would be much lower 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."

I would absolutely rupture myself laughing at this.  As it is, I find
the local University library constantly plastered over with RIAA "Did
You Know?" handouts aimed at "educating" students about the dangers of
"stealing" music.  Can you imagine how many notches higher the
reaction would be if students were sharing pirated *textbooks* and
depriving the faculty of their $120 cover price for a 250pp book?  It
would probably look like Romania in the last days of Ceaucescu.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html