Students are turning to textbook piracy to save money on books this fall, and with an array of websites at their disposal, they can now download books and print them without the hefty price tags of traditionally bound texts.
Some students pay upwards of $500 per semester for books, with many entry-level courses requiring books that can cost as much as $200 a piece.
“I pay an average of $300 a semester just on textbooks,” College of Engineering senior Andy Ortolan said. Ortolan said he has downloaded books online in the past, but said textbook piracy is not practical for his everyday class needs.
“Downloading books is time consuming,” he said. “It’s hard to find the right edition and I don’t like the fact that you can’t annotate in the book.”
Publishers are trying to respond to the need for cheaper textbooks by publishing many of their textbooks legally online for reduced prices, Association of American Publishers higher education director Stacy Skelly said. The Association of American Publishers represents publishers including McGraw Hill, Pearson Education, Freeman ‘ Worth Publishing Company.
Publishers are also protecting themselves by sending take down notices to websites that post illegal material.
Recently, the Association of American Publishers issued 1,000 take down notices on pirating websites, most of which were successful, Skelly said.
“It is an illegal action that appeals to a small group of people rather than most,” she said.
“Geekman,” an administrator for the popular download website textbooktorrents.com, who asked to only be identified by the name he uses on the website, said that textbooktorrents.com does not engage in copyright infringement because they charge the responsibility of making sure the material is not protected to the website’s users.
“It is assumed that users take responsibility for verifying that they hold the copyright to material that they upload,” he said. “The textbook industry is engaged in exploitation of those that can least afford it, as they milk their classroom-sized monopolies for every penny.”
Boston University students currently connected to the BU computing network can be charged for pirating and their names can be turned into authorities, according to the BU Lifebook.
Despite the possible repercussions for downloading textbooks illegally, the potential savings continue to tempt college students who are strapped for cash.
“I never knew that you could pirate textbooks online,” College of Arts and Sciences junior Katherine Booth said. “On average, I pay $600 to $700 a semester on books and have been doing so since the eighth grade. If I knew how to [download books online], I might. It would save me a lot of money.”
Booth said that she did not know of any friends that downloaded textbooks, but said she was sure that if they knew how to they would pirate textbooks.
“I would rather have a physical textbook because I don’t like reading things on a computer screen, but the price difference would be convincing,” said Booth.