Textbooks, free and illegal, online

Use of pirated works hurting publishers

Faced with soaring prices for textbooks, cash-strapped students have discovered a tempting, effective, but illicit alternative - pirated electronic books, available for free over the Internet.

"We think it's a significant problem," said William Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy at Cengage Learning Inc., a reference book publisher in Farmington Hills, Mich. Sampson said that in any given month, 200 to 300 of the company's titles are posted illegally as free Internet downloads. Distributing books for free without permission violates copyright laws and deprives publishers of revenue.

It's not just textbooks that are being downloaded improperly. Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at the Association of American Publishers in New York, said a survey in May located about 1,100 titles available illegally online, including novels and books on current events.

But textbook piracy is particularly seductive, McCoyd said, because students are often hard-pressed to pay for academic books that can cost more than $100, three times the price of most other books.

A 2007 graduate of the University of Texas who requested anonymity said he routinely downloaded pirated copies during his four years at college. "Textbooks were massively overpriced," said the student, who graduated with degrees in anthropology and English. He added that many books were rarely or never used in class. "All of these things . . . lead me to pirate textbooks off the Internet whenever possible," he said, adding that he continues to download illegally copied books.

McCoyd said publishers have begun offering less expensive paperback versions of some titles, and are themselves selling many legal electronic editions, or e-books, over the Internet. For instance, McGraw Hill Cos., a major textbook vendor, offers most of its titles in electronic form, at lower prices than printed editions. A McGraw Hill physics textbook that costs $135 in hardcover can be downloaded for $80 at the company's online retail store. A Utah company called CafeScribe sells electronic textbooks in a social networking format. CafeScribe's customers can discuss their coursework with others who have bought the same books.

Some instructors avoid textbooks altogether, while still making use of the Web. "I have over the last five years or so stopped the practice of assigning textbooks," said Vincent Rocchio, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University in Boston. "Instead, I publish a group of essays electronically on my course website."

Rocchio said "the outrageous cost of textbooks" makes it cheaper for him to purchase electronic publishing rights and pass the lower costs on to the students.

Still, young people who have grown accustomed to downloading music for free may be readily drawn to the prospect of getting their textbooks the same way. "If someone wants to avoid buying their textbook," said McCoyd, "this is a potential way to get it."

Some of the illegal texts available online are copied e-books, while others are paper editions that have been painstakingly uploaded page by page with digital scanners. "Is it some kid sitting in his basement doing the scanning? We don't know," said Allan Ryan, director of intellectual property at Harvard Business Publishing, an arm of Harvard Business School.

Once copied, some files are distributed through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like the popular BitTorrent. To find a title, an Internet user could visit one of many BitTorrent index sites. The sites don't actually store the illegal files, but provide links to networks of users who have copies. Clicking a link starts a BitTorrent program that downloads pieces of the book from multiple sources to form a complete copy.

Other downloads come from file-hosting sites that store complete copies of books. One such site, Scribd.com, is based in San Francisco. Backed by $3.7 million in funding from venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures, Scribd calls itself "the world's largest document-sharing community," with 17 million visitors a month. Users sign up for free accounts, which allow them to post documents on Scribd for other users to read or download. Businesses and educators use Scribd to share legitimate documents, but some account holders post copyrighted materials, including books.

Jason Bentley, Scribd's director of community development and copyright agent, said that his site allows only legal file sharing and that any files posted without permission of the copyright holder are taken down. "We will remove the item or items within hours," Bentley said in an interview. "If you have more than two works taken down for copyright infringement, your account will be closed." A federal law shields websites from copyright lawsuits if they quickly comply with removal demands from the copyright holders. Earlier this month, Bentley told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Scribd gets at least one take-down request a day, including frequent ones from Harvard University Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

McCoyd and other publishing industry officials agreed that Scribd and similar sites do remove books when a publisher complains. But with thousands of titles posted at such sites daily, publishers don't always know that their works are available. And Bentley said Scribd won't take down a file merely because it may have been posted illegally; the publisher must make a complaint.

A recent visit to Scribd revealed plenty of copyrighted materials there. For example, several titles published by Cengage Learning, like the $211 Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, were readily available for free. According to information on the site, more than 300 visitors had viewed the book. Any of them could have downloaded a complete copy.

Unlike the music recording industry, which has sued individuals who download pirated songs, book publishers haven't gone after readers who copy titles through the Internet. But they are pressuring websites that distribute the files. Peter Anaman, senior Internet investigations manager for the law firm Covington & Burling in London, tracks online book piracy for a number of publishers in the United States. Anaman and his colleagues routinely scour the Internet for pirated books, then contact website operators, warning of legal consequences if the files are not removed.

"There's a lot out there, but we've made a great deal of progress," said Anaman. "We've removed thousands."

Complicating enforcement efforts, Anaman said, many book swappers are based in countries such as China and Russia, where US copyright law carries little weight. McCoyd said the publishers' goal is "to keep this activity on the fringes and keep it from taking over the mainstream." But he conceded that fighting the pirates is a job that will not end. "You whack one down," said McCoyd, "and another one pops up."

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.