After a month of down time, embattled textbook tracker Textbook Torrents is now back online, although still without access to its domain name. The site, which can be reached via its IP address 85.17.226.223, received widespread press coverage at the beginning of July, which brought legal pressure in the form of take-down requests served on its host and domain registrar. The resulting fiasco was typical of the murky legal waters surrounding linking to copyrighted content but not hosting the content itself: the site was booted by its host and, most unusually, locked out of its domain. After scrambling to move to a new hosting service, Textbook Torrents is now back up with heightened privacy measures in place. Most significantly, it no longer records users’ IP addresses to protect user privacy should their server logs be compromised.

 

With Textbook Torrent back in the spotlight, the discussion surrounding the cost of college textbooks is livelier than ever. The man behind Textbook Tracker, who goes only by Geekman, commented to the TorrentFreak blog that he actually doesn’t oppose paying for textbooks, but that a middle ground between the current exorbitant prices and piracy is needed:

“I want to see the textbook industry change such that we are no longer needed… The companies may be corrupt, but they have a right to make money. They can’t be expected to give their material away for free. After all, there is a significant amount of work involved in the production of a textbook. We need a middle ground.”

Ultimately, this is the same debate surrounding the RIAA and music downloads, albeit with a bit of a twist: artists are far less affected by illegal downloads than authors, who don’t make nearly as much money (or any money at all) performing their content live. Nevertheless, authors make a relatively miniscule amount of money per textbook purchase, especially since textbooks are usually co-authored by a large number of people. The problem then seems to lie in the hands of the large educational publishing firms, who seem oddly bloated in a market increasingly informed by informal user-driven networks rather than top-down marketing strategies.

 

The only obvious solution is to make textbooks only in digital format, selling the content simply as it is—content. This saves the costs associated with printing and distributing textbooks, which likely make up a serious chunk of textbook prices. Most students are amenable to consuming learning materials on their computer screens, and those who aren’t can pay to have the whole book or portions of it printed. Allowing the consumer the greatest amount of control over their purchased content is in this case the best way to cut costs and protect against piracy.

Tags: Learning Technologies, Online Education