The Problem with Textbooks

COLUMNS / STUDENT AFFAIRS

We can’t blame students for textbook piracy.

Textbooks are important. They’re a major part of university study, and for subjects like law, continue to be important throughout careers. But even though they’re targeted at students, a very unlikely group to be able to afford them, they’re incredibly pricey. So how are students accessing their textbooks in spite of the costs?

Well, it’s not Studylink course-related costs. With an allowance of $1000 per year, that doesn’t cover more than three $300 textbooks. And it’s usually not high-demand copies at the UC Library either, because these are designated by lecturers, and even if there are there’s rarely if ever enough copies to cover whole classes trying to access the limited available copies.

That leaves electronic copies. As time goes on, the publishers charge university libraries more per book and per copy. In many cases, the UC Library will have only one electronic copy, which definitely doesn’t service a whole class. This leaves a “grey market” approach to books.

Online, a lot of content tells students to use “Shadow libraries” like LibGen and Anna’s Archive. These are online databases that people worldwide upload copies of books to. Because these databases are very popular, they occasionally get shut down, and they occasionally get copied by scammers. As such, students investigating these shadow libraries should verify that they’re accessing the correct websites.

However, for more niche subjects, the books won’t have been uploaded to shadow libraries. They still might, however, be available on the UC Library website. This isn’t a particularly good solution; the number of “online licenses” will be limited, so the chances are that every student borrowing a book is potentially depriving another student of the chance to study. Because of “Digital Rights Management” (for this purpose, essentially inbuilt anti-copying self-destruct in book files), there’s no way to borrow the books once but download the content permanently.

But there are solutions to this too. One way that students describe getting their textbooks without preventing other students from learning is by using “DRM stripping” software, which can create permanent copies on computers. Books downloaded from the UC library usually have a “watermark” that identifies who downloaded the file, so students who do this generally don’t share the files beyond trusted friends.

One student described their process for this as “Using the Calibre ebook software, with the ‘DeDRM’ plugin by ‘Apprentice Alf’ on Github (both being free software), make copies of borrowed textbooks on my computer so I don’t prevent other students from accessing them.”

The phenomenon of expensive textbooks challenges the university twice over. When publishers notice that students buy fewer books, they raise the prices, which raises prices for the university library, in turn encouraging piracy. But textbook piracy is something that universities don’t want happening on their campuses, so they block the shadow libraries on campus networks, as well as other methods.Until universities reorient their university presses to publish affordable learning material for their students, it seems unlikely that textbook piracy will go away any time soon.

—

Joseph Fullerton