Where to download text books?

[dpw]

Originally Posted by aportnoy

Clueless...The expenses that go into researching and prodcuing a text book are enourmous. The business model sucks as you sink the prepublication and research expenses before you sell a single copy.

Plus, your local campus bookstor is making a huge profit on the sale to you, not the publisher.

Disclosure...I work (and have worked) for McGraw-Hill for 10+ years.


Disclosure: writing textbooks is hard work. I have a pretty good idea about that as I have done 8 of them. In addition to the large upfront expense, the internal energy it takes each day to get after it is also a bit taxing.

After 20 + years in export-import and int'l trade finance I had a bad car accident, and could no longer take the physical rigors of constant travel.

My brother is an academic Dean at a major university and they wanted a more "real world" textbook on small business, and he convinced me to give writing it a go. And so it went, one to another until I guess what started as more of a hobby has become a second profession.

It is disheartening to see the complete disregard expressed by some for the people who write these books. After all, no one is forcing you to go to school, or to buy the books. I find it interesting that a $100 textbook drives many of you to distraction when, after learning what is in them, you will be in an economic position few people will ever know.

I have a strong feeling that many of the law students who have commented will not specialize in protecting intellectual property rights. I wonder how many of you will practice law by giving advice at a highly discounted rate, as you seem to think that I should do so.

 

[oman]

don't listen to these ******* idiots saying nobody has an incentive to digitize textbooks. they have been repeatedly proven empirically wrong, as the multiple gigs of textbooks on my good buddy's harddrive will show

there was a good site floating around recently (post-textbooktorrents) that had open signups but it disappeared

the holy grail right now is a bitme invite. i havent been able to get one and i have no idea how one would go about doing so

 

[oman]

thevault has some, as do scribd and onebigtorrent - but these sites have a very sparse selection

currently im in textbook-website limbo, which is a pain as it means you just gotta search the big names (sites like torrentz and demonoid), which generally have large mixed-bag compilation torrents floating around, with names like "100_economics_and_law_books.torrent"

lemme know if you need a demonoid invite, i already handed a couple out to some sf'ers ages ago

 

[Dedalus]

Originally Posted by oman

don't listen to these ******* idiots saying nobody has an incentive to digitize textbooks. they have been repeatedly proven empirically wrong, as the multiple gigs of textbooks on my good buddy's harddrive will show

It's not even true from the publisher's standpoint. My company has spent a lot of money and resources into creating a suitable e-book platform and digitizing our books. I think text publishers are just slow to move because the technology is really transient at this point and they don't want to end up in the same position as the newspapers.

 

[SirSuturesALot]

Won't digitizing textbooks open publishers up to rampant piracy?

 

[oman]

it's about thought-leading versus thought-following

they can either:

a) digitize it themselves, reduce prices to maintain student demand, and create a fantastic distribution platform (perhaps by partnering up with university libraries, or something), or

b) stay defensive, stay protectionist, and see how long they can survive before the fine gents at demonoid put them out of business

 

[scarphe]

Originally Posted by oman

it's about thought-leading versus thought-following

they can either:

a) digitize it themselves, reduce prices to maintain student demand, and create a fantastic distribution platform (perhaps by partnering up with university libraries, or something), or

b) stay defensive, stay protectionist, and see how long they can survive before the fine gents at demonoid put them out of business

or c
make copyright infringement penalties as bad normal theft. no one forces people to go to uni.

 

[kwilkinson]

Originally Posted by Dakota rube

Back in my day, the buy-back guys were traveling whores who had no connection with the bookstore at all. I remember one real shady-looking dude who always showed up on my campus: he set up his little stand in the Union and stood there with a stack of new $1s. He'd look at my books and then thumb down the stack of bills like a flip-book. It took me a couple years to realize he had sequential bills and was just going by the serial numbers.

Oh, and all the books I was selling back were carved on stone, kyle.

(Preemptive age-related joke so kwilk can't get me.)

Of the 4 colleges I've attended (sad, yes i know), only one was set up this way. I always thought it was very strange that the guy was a traveling whore and wasn't part of the actual school.
BTW, I seem to have become predictable. I do not like this.

 

[matt22616]

Unless I have a magical wacom/iPad device that will let me annotate and write in the margins I will continue to print all this **** out anyways. And that's saying a lot, because lugging around my con law casebook and Chemerinsky this past semester blew.

 

[Neo_Version 7]

What's even worse are coursepacks which you can't sell back to the bookstore.

 

[bluemagic]

Originally Posted by dpw

Disclosure: writing textbooks is hard work. I have a pretty good idea about that as I have done 8 of them. In addition to the large upfront expense, the internal energy it takes each day to get after it is also a bit taxing.

After 20 + years in export-import and int'l trade finance I had a bad car accident, and could no longer take the physical rigors of constant travel.

My brother is an academic Dean at a major university and they wanted a more "real world" textbook on small business, and he convinced me to give writing it a go. And so it went, one to another until I guess what started as more of a hobby has become a second profession.

It is disheartening to see the complete disregard expressed by some for the people who write these books. After all, no one is forcing you to go to school, or to buy the books. I find it interesting that a $100 textbook drives many of you to distraction when, after learning what is in them, you will be in an economic position few people will ever know.

I have a strong feeling that many of the law students who have commented will not specialize in protecting intellectual property rights. I wonder how many of you will practice law by giving advice at a highly discounted rate, as you seem to think that I should do so.

Orientals don't respect anything.

 

[cptjeff]

Originally Posted by scarphe

or c
... no one forces people to go to uni.



That's a bullshit line of reasoning if there ever was one.

 

[Hombre Secreto]

Right now you can find textbooks that aren't officially released by the publishers online, so I could only imagine what would happen if official releases became available. Unless publishers sell these digital textbooks dirt cheap they wouldn't make money.

 

[Reggs]

Originally Posted by scarphe

a person arm is not not twisted into buying books for education either one can try to pass the course with out them or simply leave the uni/ school, peeople are nto forced into the schools are they?

true on the first but this really a technical point. you can buy book a or disc c from company x, or you can download the same it is true that compaany x still has the inventory, but what is the point, you might as well take the inventory as well since he already lost the money invested in it, by you downloading it.
either way you cheat the system for your own greed and are just trying to justify your misdeeds.

No, it's not a "technical point." It's a very important and distinct difference. They simply dont make another sale. The same would be true if there was a secondary market for this by purchasing used textbook, but the book companies have tried to squash that out too.

Do you think a thread like this would have been made if textbooks were reasonably priced, or if there was a robust secondary market for them? This is the opertunity cost they made for themselves. I learned that concept from a pirated textbook btw

.

 

[scarphe]

Originally Posted by cptjeff

That's a bullshit line of reasoning if there ever was one.
so you are told go to uni or go to a gulag? come on