Book piracy is one of the illicit causes of spiraling book costs, the other being sale of comp copies by faculty to used book sellers. We applaud this decision, and urge those who engage in these illicit practices to stop driving the prices of textbooks up. These practices contribute to the rapid decline of an edition's new copy sales over a three year period: for every 100 copies sold in the first year, only 30 are sold in the second, and only 5 in the third, forcing publishers to increase prices in the next edition. The other "culprit" of course is used book sales, and those are forcing publishers to get into the text rental business.

Richard Hull, Executive Director, Text and Academic Authors Association

I don't in any way condone piracy, but one could make a reasonable case that the piracy is driven as much by the increases in textbook price as the other way around. With studnets paying $1,000 or more a year for textbooks you would expectthem to look for alternatives. The textbook industry needs to learn from what happened with music. Sell content in the right sized packages at a reasonable price, and in a convient way and pirary will decline. Continue to sell oversized and expensive packages and piracy will continue.

And actually textbook rentals are probably a good thing.

I have a suggestion for the textbook publishers -- publish better books with lower cost of production. It really shouldn't take multiple years and scores, if not hundreds, of contributors to produce a new textbook, especially when, after all that effort and input, the books are still rife with errors. I'm long out of college with no intention of returning, but I ran into this in a minor way just recently. My brother-in-law is a post-doc evolutionary biologist and I asked him if he could recommend a biology textbook so I could refresh my understanding of many of the basics. He replied that, unfortunately, there isn't a single one he can whole heartedly endorse. Not only do the textbooks often do a poor job of explaining concepts, he said, every last one of them he has looked at contains more than a few flagrant inaccuracies.

In lieu of quality, today's textbook publishers seem to prefer bells and whistles, interactive this, 3-d color graphics that. On occassion, these features do contribute to an improved learning experience but for the most part I think they are a mere arms race between competing publishers resulting in enormous wasted effort and expenditure, further resulting in near-criminally overpriced books.

Fortunately for students, parents, taxpayers, and nearly everyone else, opencourseware textbooks are a good moral and legal alternative to the pirate end-run around the mess created by the publishers. They may not be perfect, but then neither are the existing mainstream options, and their imperfection is properly offset by their fantastically low costs.

"A recent study by Attributor Corporation, which helps companies search for pirated works, found that the vast majority of pirated books appear on just two sites, and RapidShare was one of them."

If I were one of those companies searching for pirated works and hired Attributor Corporation to assist in the search, I would ask for my money back right about now. The "recent study" does not include torrent sites, which account for an overwhelming majority of book piracy around the world. It's a bit like surveying how people search for things on the Internet but leaving out Google.

If I want to pirate a textbook, I would use a torrent. RapidShare simply doesn't have the resources public (or private) torrent networks do and it's a pain-in-the-ass service to use. 'Good luck' to its administrators.

"The German courts had dealt with this issue and did it in a way that respected copyright and did it quickly," said Mr. Allen, of the publishers' association.

I wish the American courts would do the same re: Google Books. As each days passes, unauthorized digital printing plates for thousands of in-copyright works are being produced by Google & Company (the libraries that supply it with copyrighted works).
Douglas Fevens,
Halifax, Nova Scotia
The University of Wisconsin, Google, & Me

Richard Hull states that "Book piracy is one of the illicit causes of spiraling book costs, the other being sale of comp copies by faculty to used book sellers."

I would very much doubt the latter contributes at all to the spiraling book costs, for as many people have pointed out, textbooks go out of date rapidly. A student and a faculty member will face the same problems when attempting to resell the same obsolete text. (And if the faculty text is somehow special and contains material intended only for faculty, it will have a smaller market and have less resale value.)

Too many textbook publishers are akin to pharmaceutical companies, demanding astronomical prices for their products and then acting shocked when the marketplace finds solutions elsewhere.

As some of the above comments make clear, there is more ignorance about book publishing than there is about the ultimate, underlying building blocks of nature, the existence of God, or precisely what constitutes the good life.

Most book publishers are businesses. Businesses stay in business by serving the market. They do not prosper by giving the market what they think the market should have; they survive (on a smaller margin of profit than most people would believe) by giving the market what the market demands.

Better books at lower costs. Wow. What a concept. People seem to have the notion that the author hands a disk to the printer, who puts on that old telepathy cap, reads the author's mind, and turns out just the right number of books to fill the need. Yeah, right. Editing, reviewing, revising, copyediting, design, typesetting, proofreading, printing, binding, warehousing, marketing, shipping, and all the rest of it are just incidentals to be dispensed with.

The defects in content and presentation that are obvious to anyone with eyes and an IQ above room temperature are, to a very large extent, the result of cutting costs in the book biz. A quarter century ago, it was a revolution when publishers realized that getting the author's word-processing disk meant it wasn't necessary to rekeyboard the manuscript. This saving in time and money was considerable. Unfortunately, the people running publishing companies--few of whom were deeply steeped in production experience--assumed that similar savings were to be realized elsewhere as well. They're still looking, like the kid who knows there's a pony under that straw somewhere.

Cutting costs seldom improves the product. Has hiring adjuncts improved education?

Textbook publishers should have children's book writers edit textbooks for readability. So many textbooks are murky at best and impossible in difficult passages.

A thousand years ago, when I started using textbooks, they came in single volumes. When taking courses in recent years, I've never had time to use any of the multiple supplementary aids except lab manuals. I wonder whether anyone does. I'm told by friends in math that the best calculus textbook is still the one written by Love eighty years ago and updated periodically for thirty years. It is one volume about the size of a modest novel.

It seems to me that these are basics--readability and quality. If publishers can't provide basics, what use is all the glut of paper and technology?

Textbook publishing has been concerned with readability for decades. In the late '70s and early '80s, just to turn to my own experience, publishers were compelled to demonstrate such-and-such a level of readability, and there were more readability formulas than you could count. Words per sentence, syllables per word, lines per paragraph: any and all theoretical measures of "readability" eventually made it impossible to use the word without quotation marks. The initial objective--making books that students could read--was of course lost in the fool's quest for some magic formula.

As anyone familiar with the written word could tell you, real readability cannot be reduced to a formula. Neither can most other significant problems.

The multivolume "text" is no new problem, either, and the frustration is certainly understandable. I have no idea what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure no publisher ever came up with the multiple-supplement concept ex nihilo.

I don't want to try to imagine a calculus or any other text written by the author of children's books. But impenetrability isn't new. A certain ed psych text used in the mid-'60s advised "When utilizing positive reinforcement, it is desirable to establish close temporal contiguity between the reinforcement and the desired response." When you pat a kid on the head, do it right away.

None of the problems with textbooks are new. Neither are any of the proposed solutions. Just because I've never thought about [choose topic] doesn't mean nobody has.

From various whispered corners, I have also been told about the massive industry consolidation in publishing, and that it might--just might--have decreased competition and increased costs. I haven't seen any numbers, so take this with a grain of salt, but this is one trend line that I'd be interested in seeing.