[p2p-research] lightfoot book sharing ?

[Michel Bauwens]

I'm guessing these networks already exist

in thailand, I would guess less than 3% of the students buy real textbooks,
they couldn't even if they wanted to, think U.S. prices, but times four in
terms of impact on your budget ..

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 3:17 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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