Rent (or Steal) This Book!
By Richard Moore / July 3, 2008 / Comments Off
It may not be what publishers or lawmakers are after, but you can’t deny the power of the market when it comes to the high cost of college texts.
One company is renting books to students, billing itself as the “Netflix” of texts.
According to the promotional material for Chegg.com, “Textbook rentals help college students save hundreds of dollars on buying new or used college textbooks each semester. With millions of new and used books, finding the textbook you need at discounted prices is easy, not to mention our fast delivery and easy book returns.”
They also say that, in addition to renting cheap textbooks, Chegg is committed to preserving our forests by planting a tree for each transaction.
In another development, the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) reports that publishers are going after companies offering pirated editions of textbooks in pdf format. After all, it’s a relatively simple process to scan books into digital form and put them on the Web. It’s illegal, of course.
From the article:
One Website, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.“There are very few scanned textbooks in circulation, and that’s what we’re here to change,” says a welcome message on the Textbook Torrents site. “Chances are you have some textbooks sitting around, so pick up a scanner and start scanning it!”
And:
In response to such sites, the Association of American Publishers hired an outside law firm this summer to scour the Web for illegally offered textbooks. Already the firm has identified thousands of instances of book piracy and has sent legal notices to Websites hosting the files demanding that they be removed. The group is looking for all types of books, though trade books and textbooks, which generally have high price tags, are the most frequent books offered on peer-to-peer sites.