Textbook piracy on the rise

After paying for tuition, housing, transportation and student fees, the last thing many students want to do is to spend several hundred more dollars on school supplies.

Pens and backpacks may come cheaply enough, but college textbooks infamously do not.

Rather than shell out the money on books at their college bookstore, many students are resorting to alternative methods, such as renting, borrowing, buying used books, or illegally downloading them.

According to The New York Times, students spend an average of $700 to $1,100 on textbooks a year, “representing one of their biggest expenses after tuition and room and board.”

UH offers students $400 textbook loans available for the fall and spring semesters and a $200 loan for the summer.

Some students choose to circumvent the cost entirely and pirate their textbooks instead. Students download PDF files of their textbooks online, or copy pages from friends’ books or library copies.

“At a theory level, under copyright law’s ‘first sale’ doctrine, once a student buys a copy of a book, she or he is free to resell it without penalty. So resales are not thefts,” said UH law professor Craig Joyce. “I do question the ethics of any professor who receives a publisher’s complimentary copy of a book, clearly conditioned upon not reselling it, who then sells to (a) professional buyer to resell to students.”

“At a practical level, my own casebook on copyright law is 1,000 pages long. I doubt many students stand around copying it at the library.”

Former President George W. Bush signed the Higher Education Opportunity Act in August 2008.

The law, which went into effect the following year, was written in order to combat unauthorized file-sharing in colleges and universities.

The requirements, according to a press release from Eastern Illinois University, were of “an annual disclosure to students describing copyright law and campus policies related to violating copyright law, a plan to ‘effectively combat’ copyright abuse on the campus network using a ‘variety of technology-based deterrents’ and agreement to ‘offer alternatives to illegal downloading.’”

Still, piracy remains prevalent, and in a 2013 survey with the Book Industry Study Group, 34 percent of students reported downloading course content online, up from 20 percent in 2010. Similarly, 31 percent reported photocopying or scanning others’ textbooks, up from 21 percent in 2010.

“If one thinks things through, sales by publishers are necessary if publishers are going to be able to continue to put out new textbooks and new editions of established books. Our copyright system is based on financial incentives to publishers to publish and authors to write,” Joyce said.

“Perhaps publishers could establish better, cheaper alternatives for distribution. But it would seem to be in everyone’s best interest, at least for now, for publishers to continue to exist. The future may be a different matter.”

However, even if it became easier or cheaper to buy textbooks online or in person, many students could likely continue to pirate them.

“The majority of the times when people pirate the books, they more than likely have it set in their mind that they’re probably not going to spend any money on it,” said mechanical engineering sophomore Tommy Lin.

“It also depends on how much of a reduction of a price there is,” Lin said. “If they were to drop a significant amount to, say, a 10th of the price, there probably would be (fewer people pirating textbooks). It’s just that in most cases when someone states a reduced price, it usually isn’t that huge of a drop.”

As technology improves, so do legal alternatives to pirating textbooks. Websites like Amazon, Chegg and Textbookrentals offer the ability to rent textbooks for a fraction of the cost. Many students also buy international versions of textbooks, which have greatly reduced prices but may have different cover art or practice problems. The UH Bookstore offers digital and rental versions of many textbooks as well.

“I actually think that the system used by (the Center for Academic Support and Assessment) for textbooks and homework accessed by the codes is acceptable, but really I kind of wish that textbooks weren’t really that much of a necessity,” Lin said.

“I suppose websites would be a good solution; many professors currently use their websites for putting up covered materials and I think that’s a pretty good system.”

Piracy is only getting more popular every year. Students may continue to find themselves unwilling to spend $200 on a math textbook that they will only use for four months — or not at all.

Students are directing the growth of coursework technology. It is up to publishers whether to follow their lead.

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