NYTimes reports on textbook piracy. Textbooks are being scanned and torrented on The Pirate Bay, et all. Scanning the entirety of a text book seems like a lot of work, but I guess it pays off:
Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks. More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue — and the demand for used books goes up all the more.
So the Napster moment is coming for print publishers? I think they have a certain fear of this. I think there is a willingness to try new things, but the problems is locking them down with DRM doesn’t work, and doesn’t make anyone happy. I think this has a lot to do with why we were given a Creative Common license for Digital Foundations