Where to download text books? - Page 5

well a sale is missed but that sit point of the product no? to be sold to cover the costs of the entire operatiosn that allwoed itn to enter your hands.
when one pirates a book music program etcyes the rpoduct is th still ther but eh entire point of the system is lost, and it has the saem affect as normal theft the producers, distribuotrs and stockist may still have the product but they lost the money invested in it, so the product might as well have been stolen.

Piracy is copyright infringement, not theft. Why can't people get this through their heads?

Theft of a textbook would require depriving the publisher or store of inventory (it follows that you also deny them a sale, but there is no guarantee that the stolen copy would have sold). Copyright infringements doesn't take away anyones property.

Some people argue that you are depriving a sale but again there is no guarantee that the pirate would have ever bought the book (it is quite likely that if they were too cheap to buy it in the first place, their next options will be library or half.com where the publisher gets nothing either).

For a bonus, did you know that all of the people getting sued for piracy are in trouble for uploading? Thats right--pure downloaders get off scott free (although torrents require you to upload and download).

The only way we are going to work past this thing is when more people start realizing that branding everyone falsely as thieves is not going to save an old business model. The faster people learn that, the faster you will see things like itunes and amazon music stores being rolled out. I certainly know people who used to pirate away happily but now have a little disposable income and have discovered that paying itunes 99c is way easier than trying to find clean downloads of anything thats not in the top-40

See "digital music downloads".

I was surprised than anyone would pay money for mp3s, but several quite profitable enterprises prove me wrong.

Unless these text books cost around what an mp3 album does... they aren't going to sell that many copies. Someone will upload these books, and many will download them. You will be hearing publishers crying about all the illegal downloads soon enough.

why can't people get it through their heads that the net effect is pretty much the same. Read the post above yours again.

Copyright infringement and theft both have the net effect of reducing the amount of money the creator makes. Sure, actual theft also causes the loss of a physical copy, but we've already discussed in this article that the tangible cost of each copy is tiny compared to the fixed costs of publishing a textbook.

Maybe textbooks are some special good since the market is pretty small (the only people buying OR pirating them are probably taking a class and *need* the book) but the tiny cost isn't really any different from other mediums...its not like CDs or DVDs are expensive to press.

With most things that are pirated though, there is a significant difference--most pirates would probably never be your customers, they are just getting it because it is free. I have seen some informal studies done on iphone piracy rates where found that the statistics were far higher than the possible total number of customers ( based on how many jailbroken phones could even play the games and how many people would actually buy it). If all of the sudden they couldn't pirate some crappy pop song to play at a party, most pirates would probably play the damn youtube video instead of spending money buying a copy of Party in the USA. If they couldn't download a movie, they might redbox or netflix it (which leads to very little studio income as those disks might get used 100's of times). My point is, these downloads to not translate even loosely into a lost sale of a $15 album or a $25 DVD.

Don't get me wrong, I like a sane copyright system--my dad is a photographer and licensing images basically paid for the first 22 years of my life--but it is stupid to buy into the arguments the record industry use to cover up their failing business model.

With textbooks, I find that people like real paper books--normal people recognize that the book price is very small compared to the tuition (and you can probably resell it for almost as much on half.com--though this gives no money to the publisher, it might have incentivezed you to buy new knowing that you could resell). The only reason people would start to pirate textbooks en-masse would be if they were forced to use some DRM-laden piece of shit ebook that was hard to navigate and use. In that case, the pirated plain-PDF would be a better product than the real version and FREE.

I agree, not all pirates would have bought the product, so not every piracy would have been a sale. It's hard to say what percentage would have been actual sales. With textbooks, I'd guess the number would be greater than 50%, and with music probably less than 50% - but that's not really the issue.

Still, when it's boiled-down, the difference between theft and copyright infringement is simply magnitude.

most will nto agree with this because they want to think they are better than the peopel that steal their bikes/ cars, while still downloading thing they should not, because you know the probelm is not but the evil compaines that overprice their products.