The Death Of Ownership: Educational Publishing Giant Pearson To Do Away With Print Textbooks (That Can Be Resold)

from the you-don't-own-anything dept

It sometimes is difficult to get people to understand just how >utterly insane the college textbook market is. You have a captive audience who has no choice but to purchase what the professor requires (which is why it's doubly lame when professors require their own books). But even people who went to college a few decades ago may not be aware of just how much textbook prices have kept rising. A study from 2015 showed that college textbook prices had risen over 1000% since 1977. 1,000%.

Another BLS study from 2016 showed that, in the education space, the price of textbooks had gone up even faster than the cost of tuition (which is also skyrocketing).

In short: college textbooks are crazy, crazy expensive. And one way that people have dealt with this over the years is (1) by buying used textbooks, or (2) by selling back the textbooks at the end of the semester (or in some cases, both). However, that's the one factor that's acted as competition to the textbook market.

And the publishers want to do away with it.

The largest educational textbook publisher, Pearson, has now announced that it's going to phase out print textbooks and move solely to electronic textbooks. If you actually want a physical textbook, you'll only be able to "rent" it:

Pearson said students would only be able to rent physical textbooks from now on, and they would be updated much less frequently.

The British firm hopes the move will make more students buy its e-textbooks which are updated continually.

There's an argument that ebooks have certain advantages -- and can be updated much more quickly. Also carrying around a ton of textbooks can be a pain. But, we're once again left in a world where the concept of "ownership" is left open. I still have a bunch of college textbooks that I sometimes even refer back to. But under this system, if you stop paying your "subscription" fees, those can go away.

And, yes, there's value in embracing a more digital future -- but it's difficult to believe that Pearson is truly doing this to improve the value for students, rather than just upending the older market order, and taking away the ability for people to own and to resell textbooks.

Filed Under: captive markets, copyright, monopoly pricing, ownership, rentals, subscriptions, textbooks
Companies: pearson

Photocopying Textbooks Is Fair Use In India: Western Publishers Withdraw Copyright Suit Against Delhi University

from the let's-celebrate-a-rare-win-for-the-public dept

Back in September last year, Mike wrote about the remarkable court ruling in India that copyright is not inevitable, divine or a natural right. As we have been reporting since 2013, the case in question was brought by three big Western publishers against Delhi University and a photocopy shop over "course packs" -- bound collections of photocopied extracts from books and journals that are sold more cheaply than the sources. Although the High Court of Delhi ruled that photocopying textbooks in this way is fair use, that was not necessarily the end of the story: the publishers might have appealed to India's Supreme Court. But as the Spicy IP site reports, they didn't:

In a stunning development, OUP, CUP and Taylor & Francis just withdrew their copyright law suit filed against Delhi University (and its photocopier, Rameshwari) 5 years ago! They indicated this to the Delhi high court in a short and succinct filing made this morning.

This withdrawal brings to an end one of the most hotly contested IP battles ever, pitting as it did multinational publishers against academics and students.

The Spicy IP post has a useful short timeline of the case, as well as a link to the site's extremely detailed coverage of all the twists and turns of the saga, which is now finally -- and definitively -- over. Importantly, the case was:

one that ultimately tested the bounds of copyright law in India. And clarified that while educational photocopying is permissible, there are limits to this as well. And that any copying must comport closely with the intended purpose ("in the course of instruction"). In that sense, publishers have made some gains in at least ensuring that a complete free for all regime is not what is intended by the law. But a circumspect one, where the copying has to fall within the bounds of the educational exception.

Overall, this is a huge victory for educational access and public interest in India. And very welcome in a world that was witnessing a rather one sided ratcheting up of IP norms, at the cost of all else!

That's an important point. So often it seems that copyright only ever gets longer and stronger, with the public always on the losing side. The latest news from India shows that very occasionally, it's the public that wins.

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Filed Under: copyright, fair use, india, photocopying, textbooks
Companies: cambridge university press, cup, delhi university, oup, oxford university press, rameshwari, taylor & francis

DailyDirt: Those Who Can, Write Textbooks...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Textbooks are surprisingly expensive items. The classic example is an introductory math textbook: where the math hasn't changed significantly for over a hundred years, but the price of the newest edition seems to suggest that there should be a lot of new material added to the book. Sure, there's a used book market -- and even rental books nowadays -- but the trend of rising textbook prices has some students and faculty questioning some of the publishing industry's practices.

• The Supreme Court upheld that anyone, particularly Supap Kirtsaeng, can buy textbooks in Asia and re-sell them for a nice profit in the US -- thanks to the first sale doctrine. Kirtsaeng won his case, but he didn't get his copyright-holding opponents to pay for his legal bills. That could change, though, if the Supreme Court decides in his favor again. [url]
• There are some obvious problems when professors try to use cheaper textbooks as teaching materials -- including pissing off the authors who might be in positions of authority at the school. Should academic freedom allow a professor to chose a different textbook from his/her colleagues? Will the racket of monotonically increasing textbook prices continue? [url]
• The 'Integral House' in Canada is up for sale -- once owned by math professor James Stewart. The calculus textbooks authored by Stewart have raked in many, many millions from college students over the years, but if you have a few million yourself to spare, you can buy this math-inspired house (which looks like it comes with a library of math books). [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: academic freedom, education, integral house, james stewart, oer, open educational resources, open textbook, supap kirtsaeng, textbooks

DailyDirt: Open Textbooks Starting To Save Students Real Money

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

One aspect of the open educational resources movement (OER) is open textbooks that are free to use -- content in the public domain or with copyright terms that require only attribution (or attribution and share-alike clauses). Open textbooks have taken some time to get written, reviewed and adopted -- but now that there are hundreds of these books available, students should be able to use them freely and benefit from (and even contribute to) these educational materials.

• One estimate reports that college students can save about $128 per course by using open textbooks. That's just a few hundred bucks that pales in comparison to tuition these days, but it could be a significant dent in the publishing industry if every class used open textbooks. [url]
• OpenStax college books claims to have saved students $39 million in the 2015-16 academic year. OpenStax says that 1 in 5 US colleges are using its textbooks. Launched in 2012, OpenStax is on target for its goal of publishing textbooks for the 25 most-attended college courses and saving students $500 million by 2020. [url]
• Several states have endorsed open textbook projects. Besides OpenStax, Minnesota has an open textbook library, and California is trying to cut its $400 million costs on K-12 textbooks (someday). [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: education, oer, open educational resources, open textbook, openstax, textbooks

Developers Of Chrome Extension That Finds Cheaper Textbook Prices Receive Legal Threats From Major Textbook Supplier

from the cease-and-desist-of-self-affliction-+1 dept

The textbook publishing industry has turned books of facts into overvalued goods on par with "priceless" finds at antique stores. To keep margins high and the revenue stream flowing, publishers screw with pagination in order to create "new" editions every year, turning textbooks into useless piles of paper the moment they're purchased. Trading one in at the end of the class means receiving pennies on the dollar for your original investment. Stocking up for another semester's worth of classes means shelling out hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Rinse. Repeat.

So, when someone comes along and threatens this business model, publishers are swift to react. Offensive efforts -- like locking schools into yearly purchases for instructors' versions and acting as "partners" in campus bookstores -- have mitigated most of the damage caused by outside forces like Amazon and used book retailers.

But the publishers also play defense. A side project from Texts.com (a service that helps students scour the web for the best prices on textbooks) has caught the attention of Follett, one of the nation's largest suppliers of campus bookstores.

OccupyTheBookstore is a Chrome extension that allows users to find better prices on textbooks while browsing bookstore websites. Follett doesn't like this because the extension draws sales away from the stores it supplies. It sent a cease-and-desist request to the team behind the extension, asking (nicely, at this point) to knock it off or it will be "forced" to involve its legal team.

In an AMA at Reddit, the team announced it has no interest in complying with Follett's request.

We've been asked to remove the extension by Follett, a $2.7 billion company that services over 1700+ college bookstores. Instead of complying, we rebuilt the extension from the ground up and re-branded it as #OccupyTheBookstore, as the user is literally occupying their website to find cheaper deals.

Because of the way the extension is constructed and operates, it would appear Follett has no legal basis for its takedown demand.

Follett had a few angles, none of which have much merit:

They could try the Copyright angle, arguing that our plugin constitutes copyright infringement by creating an unauthorized adaptation of their page. That said, we're opt-in, so while we are modifying the web page, we're only doing so with the end-users permission. Additionally, we’re not manipulating information or blocking the ability to use any/all aspects of the site if the end user so desires.

They could also try the Terms of Service angle, saying that we're knowingly equipping their users to breach the TOS by using scrapers, data-extractors, etc. That said, we never directly interact with any bookstore website, we merely supplement information provided by the end-users local browser. As such, we think that they could theoretically go after the individual student, but they probably would never bother.

In searching for precedent, we looked at AdBlock heavily, and also at price-comparison plugins like Honey.

This thought process was confirmed by Honey's developer, who pointed out that end users have the right to modify content delivered to their browsers. What the extension does is bring Text.com's search power to the bookstores' websites via an overlaid menu. It makes no use of the original website other than to gather the book information needed to provide relevant results -- something any user could do with a few extra steps. The original website is unaltered. Only the new menu -- opted into by the end user -- provides anything different from the normal user experience.

Follett's legal team has likely already determined the company can't do much about this extension, hence the polite request to stop. The next move -- if there is one -- will probably be vague pressure and subtle hints about expensive future court battles, even if the extension's developers would likely prevail. The good news is that the team has heard from the EFF, which has extensive experience in fighting this sort of quasi-legal chicanery.

The other good news is the inadvertent effect of Follett's shutdown attempt: the extension is far more popular now than it was before the company tried to head off this threat to its business model.

In an interview, [Texts.com founder Peter] Frank said that before today the tool had only been downloaded 200 times since it was first made available in April. By Friday evening, it had been downloaded 15,000 times.

All Follett had to do was leave it alone. Now, it's faced with a viral opponent and armed with little more than law firm letterhead.

Filed Under: chrome, extension, occupy the bookstore, occupythebookstore, peter frank, prices, textbooks, threats
Companies: follett, texts.com

Study Indicates College Textbook Piracy Is On The Rise, But Fails To Call Out Publishers For Skyrocketing Prices

from the the-best-way-to-replace-'lost'-money-is-to-charge-people-more,-apparentl dept

More college students are pirating textbooks, or so a report seems to indicate even if the methodology seems a little less than solid. The numbers (reported here by Reason) are based on self-reporting from survey respondents, which means the supposed uptick in infringing downloads may actually be a downturn, or nowhere near the actual percentages. But here are the numbers reported by the Book Industry Study Group, which sounds like the entity least likely to receive accurate infringement numbers from survey respondents.

The group surveyed 1,600 students, 25 percent of whom said they or someone they knew illegally downloaded textbooks. That's up 8 percent from the previous year.

Most likely, this number is low -- but the methodology is already suspect. Adding "or someone they knew" makes the results somewhat meaningless without more details. To illustrate, take an extreme hypothetical: on a campus with 100 students, if you have one super popular student who illegally downloads textbooks while everyone else doesn't, you could have everyone report "they knew" someone who "illegally downloaded," leading to 100% even as the actual percentage is 1%. Any survey that has a "you or someone you know" in it almost certainly creates a double, triple, quadruple counting problem as there's no way to distinguish if the "person known" has already been counted in the survey methodology.

Here are some of the "key takeaways" BISG has posted based on these results.

Students report a gradual decline in the use of both core textbooks and learning management systems with a somewhat increased usage of online study guides, suggesting that pedagogical material is becoming more flexible in ways students value.

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.

The report assumes the self-reported infringement increase is legit, but the key takeaways never point to the main culprit: textbook publishers. Perhaps that's because these studies were underwritten by those who would be least receptive to open criticism.

BISG thanks Diamond Sponsor MBS Direct, Platinum Sponsors Barnes and Noble College and McGraw-Hill Education, and Gold Sponsors Cengage Learning, Follett Higher Education Group, Pearson, and Blackboard for sponsoring Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education Volume 4 and Cengage Learning and Barnes & Noble College for sponsoring Faculty Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education.

Prices for textbooks border on extortionate. Valerie Strauss, covering the subject for the Washington Post, notes that prices for both tuition and books have increased at unreal rates over the past several years. (It should also be noted that BISG's report is no bargain -- $675 for "summaries" and $3,195 for the "Volume Four Bundle PDF".)

Strauss also notes data from a 2013 Government Accountability Office study. It shows that textbook prices nearly parallel the astronomical inflation tuition and have gone up 82 percent in the last decade. An American Enterprise Institute Paper indicates that in the last 35 years textbooks have gone up a jaw-dropping 812 percent – hundreds of percentage points higher than general consumer prices, new houses, or even medical services.

Book publishers contribute to this skyrocketing rate by forcing the purchase of new editions nearly every single year -- using little tricks like adding or removing a few paragraphs to force repaginating or adding minimal amounts of new material in order to claim the previous version is now outdated.

Publishers are also trying to curb piracy by selling digital versions that are somehow only "good" for a single year (thanks, licenses!) and rendered inoperative if pirated by requiring an internet connection to access content and features. These are usually only slightly cheaper than their physical counterparts, but can't be resold at the end of the year to recoup any of the purchase price and can be completely useless to the purchaser (depending on what's locked up by the license) after the end of the license term.

So, if students pirate books and are doing it more frequently, at least some of the blame rests on the shoulders of the publishers and their overpriced offerings. Abuse a captive market long enough and it will start routing around you.

Some of the blame lies with the instructors and the universities themselves, who require certain specific versions (and will accept no substitutes) or are more interested in pumping up sales of their own works than ensuring their students can afford to take their classes.

A year ago a student wrote on a Tumblr blog called “Children of the Stars” complaining about a professor who insisted that students buy an online version of a specific paperback sociology book for more than $200 — which the professor wrote himself — and would not allow them to purchase “an older, paperback edition of the same book for $5.” The student continued: “This is why we download.”

This subject prompted "deep news" site Vocativ to try out some textbook piracy of its own, all under the headline "Why College Students Are Stealing Their Textbooks." (Original titles -- "Why Nobody Is Paying For Expensive Textbooks Anymore" and "Why Lots Of College Students Simply Stopped Paying For Textbooks" [see the page title and url] -- apparently weren't inaccurate/provocative enough.)

Some sites, like Ebookee and TextbookRevolution, focus more on math and science textbooks. Others, like Free-ebooks and Freebookspot, have a deeper selection of humanities-related tomes. We didn’t have to look far to find what we needed. At Textbooknova, we acquired a torrent app and were off to the races. We typed in the titles for our books, one by one, and found them all immediately. Within minutes, we had four textbooks on our hard drive: Herodutus’ Histories, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Physics: The Human Adventure.

Nice "pirating." Three out of the four books listed are in the public domain. Publication dates (in the order listed) 440 BC, 1789 (for the latest edition), 1478 and 2001.

Textooks are foisted upon students by schools and professors, meaning there will always be a market for publishers' offerings. But publishers are burning their facilitators as well with steadily-increasing prices. Educators and administrators are also noticing that publishers are demanding the purchase of new editions every year. Some schools are hesitant to keep passing these costs along to their own paying customers. And others that can't simply allow students to directly take the hit (elementary/high school) are starting to express their displeasure in being treated just as shoddily as thousands of college students. 800 times the rate of inflation over 35 years simply isn't sustainable, and infringement is one of the trailing indicators of an industry that has priced itself out of the market.

Filed Under: copyright, educations, piracy, prices, textbooks

Duke Professors Looking To Make Legal Texts Affordable; Kicking Off With Intellectual Property Law

from the make-it-so dept

James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School have recognized what many people have: the academic publishing world is insane. Textbook pricing is generally insane, in part because the people who make the decision (the professors) are not the people doing the buying (the students), meaning that the buyers have little to no choice in what they buy. That enables the publishers to jack up the prices to absolutely insane rates. This even includes legal "casebooks" and "statutory supplements," which are often composed of mostly public domain material (or, legal filings where the person who put together the book had no authorship). So Boyle and Jenkins are working on an open coursebook for intellectual property, which looks like it's going to be fantastic.

To kick it off, however, they've now released an Intellectual Property Statutory Supplement, which basically has the text of various relevant laws and international agreements concerning intellectual property in the United States. A somewhat equivalent book that many law schools use will run you over $50. But the Boyle/Jenkins statutory supplement is free to download, or available for print-on-demand at cost (around $10) for law students who need paper copies and can't bring electronic copies into classrooms. As they note in the announcement about this project:

We are motivated in part by the outrageously steep cost of legal teaching materials, (and the increasing restrictions on those materials — such as the removal of the right of first sale). This book is intended for use with our forthcoming Intellectual Property casebook (coming in the Fall) but can also be used as a free or low cost supplement for basic Intellectual Property courses — at the college, law school or graduate school levels. Whether or not you buy it, the free download will at the very least gives you a statutory reference book for those times when internet access is unavailable, and you just need to scratch that intellectual property research itch. The book is also available at cost of production — about $10.50 — as a handsomely covered paperback. Most of the current Intellectual Property Statutory & Treaty Supplements are $45-$50.

As you may recall, just a few months ago, we wrote about some well-known publishers of legal casebooks trying to undermine first sale rights by requiring students to give back books they bought in exchange for access to a digital copy (which may or may not stay online). It's good to see folks like Boyle and Jenkins step in and recognize that there's more to be gained by sharing knowledge and information, rather than seeking to lock it up. I hope other professors will follow suit.

Oh, and as a bonus, you owe it to yourself to read their posting on Thomas Macaulay's famed 1841 speech about the dangers of copyright maximalism. We've quoted from it at times, and the famous line from it is usually how "the effect of [the copyright] monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad." However, the entire speech is worth reading, and here they highlight a warning against copyright maximalism, in which he notes that it will lead to less respect for the law. Remember, he was saying this in 1841. Fairly prescient, huh?

At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.

Filed Under: academic publishing, casebooks, copyright, creative commons, intellectual property, intellectual property statutory supplement, james boyle, jennifer jenkins, legal case books, patents, public domain, textbooks

India Wants Students And Researchers To Have The Right To Photocopy Books

from the medicines-for-the-mind dept

Techdirt has run several stories about the difficulties students in emerging economies have when it comes to buying expensive study materials. Back in 2012, Costa Rican students took to the streets to defend their right to photocopy otherwise unaffordable university textbooks. Earlier this year, Indian textbook authors asked for a lawsuit brought by Western publishers against Delhi University and a nearby photocopying shop over alleged infringements to be dropped. A common element to those two stories is that students often resort to making photocopies of books, since they can't afford the originals. According to this story from Calcutta's The Telegraph, it seems that the Indian government wants to turn the practice into a recognized right:

India will seek changes to international copyright regulations so that students and researchers can procure photocopies of expensive books without having to pay royalties, a senior government source said.

Come December, he said, the Union human resource development ministry will ask the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) to relax its norms that protect authors' and publishers' commercial rights over their books.

The ministry will suggest at the next general assembly of Wipo, a UN body with 185 nations as members, that educational and research institutions be exempted from the copyright regime.

That's a pretty bold move, and it will be interesting to see the details. But it is certainly in keeping with India's successful attempts to make vital medicines available to its people at prices they can afford, despite what the patent-holders might want. In some ways, this new plan is an extension of that idea, since it recognizes that some things -- like medicine or knowledge -- are simply too important for developing countries to be kept locked up by Western monopolists.

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Filed Under: copyright, education, india, photocopies, research, textbooks

Innovative Open Textbook Company Fights Back Against Publishers' Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

from the what-infringement? dept

Last year, we wrote about how a bunch of the largest textbook publishing firms had teamed up to sue an innovative open textbook startup called Boundless for copyright infringement. Was Boundless reproducing their books? Nope. Instead it had created alternative textbooks from various open sources -- but those texts mirrored the basic structure of other textbooks. It was this copying of "selection, structure, organization and depth of coverage... right down to duplicating Plaintiff's pagination" that the textbook publishers went after. Not the content. Yes, they're pissed off that Boundless cleverly sought to compete in the marketplace by making sure its textbooks were good competitors and easier to substitute in -- but without copying any of the actual content.

It's been nearly a year, but Boundless has filed its counterclaims, denying the various charges, and insisting that its works have never infringed, that the textbook publishers are claiming copyright over "non-copyrightable material" and that even if there were infringement, they are protected by fair use. They also claim that the lawsuit is a form of copyright misuse and shows the publishers' "abuse of the copyright monopoly." Should make for an interesting case.

At the same time, Boundless is also seeking a declaratory judgment on its new offerings. Apparently, the company changed its offerings substantially over the last year, and while the case is still over what those earlier offerings looked like (which Boundless believes did not infringe), it's seeking a clear statement that its newer offerings won't get the company sued as well. Boundless' lawyer sent the publishers a letter last month, asking them to make it clear that the lawsuit was just over the older versions and that there were no issues with the new version, but the publishers have refused, saying that the results of the trial "will inform... current and future business practices." In other words, let's see what happens with this case, and then we'll decide if we can sue over more stuff.

We recently had a lively discussion in the comments on a recent post about the upcoming Supreme Court ruling in the Kirtsaeng case, which is somewhat relevant. The Kirstaeng case, of course, involves first sale rights, and whether or not you'll be able to resell what you bought legally abroad. A defender of taking away first sale rights (i.e., upholding the lower court ruling) argued that if the Supreme Court allows the first sale doctrine to apply to textbooks bought abroad, it will mean that textbook providers will jack up their prices abroad, rather than offer them cheaply, and thus poor students in third world countries will never be able to afford an education.

As we pointed out, this is hogwash and ignores that markets are dynamic. If the big expensive publishers decide to drop out of such markets, it seems pretty clear that there will be others who will quickly step in -- and innovative companies like Boundless were exactly what we were thinking about. They're not infringing on the works of the big publishers. They're providing much-needed competition against an oligopoly that has worked hard at keeping prices ridiculously high for educational resources. It's a market ripe for disruption, and it's silly (though not unexpected) that publishers are seeking to abuse copyright law to stamp out that disruption, rather than learning to innovate themselves.

Filed Under: copyright, open, textbooks

DailyDirt: Arithmetic Is The Third R?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

International math tests seem to consistently show that Americans don't have competitive math skills. We can argue that these tests don't measure real-life capabilities, but it might also be nice to see math test scores rise someday. Given the growth of online educational tools, the accessibility of good (and effective) math lessons will hopefully help to improve everyone's math talents. Here are just a few interesting links on the topic of math.

• A study of German math students suggests that parental pressure and good grades don't provide lasting incentives for kids to learn math skills. It seems obvious that the motivation behind learning would affect how well a student learns, but the conclusion could have some interesting effects on education policy and how to most effectively teach children. [url]
• Equations Squared is an online math game that assesses a player's skills as he/she plays -- awarding points for more complex mathematical understanding. The story of how this game was created is interesting, and the game won the grand prize in the ETS Math Assessment Game Challenge. [url]
• Math textbooks are created by a publishing industry which doesn't necessarily care about the quality of education. There are a lot of problems in the US education system, but there may be some creative destruction in store for the textbook industry. [url]
• Adding a nonsensical math equation to your writing can give it a bit more authority. a^n+b^n=c^n QED [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: arithmetic, education, equations, gamification, math, textbooks