Textbook Torrents Makes Long Awaited Comeback
Written by Ernesto on August 05, 2008After a month of downtime, TextBook Torrents makes its return, right on time, as the first semester starts in just a few weeks. The BitTorrent tracker, dedicated to sharing knowledge in the form of textbooks, was pulled offline by Dreamhost early July because the hosting company received a takedown request.
The Textbook Torrents tracker is considered to be the largest library of textbooks on BitTorrent. The site had been flying under the radar for quite some time but this changed a month ago. On July 1st, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story on the site, which was picked up by Slashdot and later the LA Times blog.
All this attention led to thousands of new visitors to the tracker, but the publicity also had a downside. Geekman, the administrator of Textbook Torrents told TorrentFreak that their host, xlHost, and their domain registrar, Dreamhost, both received a takedown request a few days after all the press coverage. “We received a DMCA notice from Pearson Education a week or so prior, which we complied with, but it was a group of publishers that contacted our host,” he told us.
Although the tracker was pretty popular, with around 20,000 peers trading files at any given point in time, Geekman said he had never received takedown notices from big publishers before. “We had a couple of emails from individuals before, but nothing from organizations. One was an editor complaining about being cheated out of his 10¢ per copy commission.”
On July 5th Dreamhost suspended Geekman’s account, and despite his many efforts to contact them, they simply didn’t respond to his inquiries. It took more than a week before he was allowed to transfer the domain. Now, more than a month after the site went down, Textbook Torrents returns, and it’s not planning to go away anytime soon.
Geekman plans to focus on making the site’s resources redundant, to reduce vulnerability and to make sure the site remains online. In addition he will work on the legal issues and improve the privacy of the site’s users. One of the most drastic changes is the decision to stop the logging of IP-addresses, which means that the site will stop ratio tracking. Making the tracker public will ensure the privacy of the users, in case the server is compromised.
“I want to see the textbook industry change such that we are no longer needed,” Geekman says when we ask him about his main motivation to bring the site back, while mentioning cheap books and responsible business practices as examples of positive change.
He doesn’t think publishers should give away their books –even though some authors profit from doing so– but he does think most books are too expensive. “The companies may be corrupt, but they have a right to make money. They can’t be expected to give their material away for free. After all, there is a significant amount of work involved in the production of a textbook. We need a middle ground,” he says.
“I’m not naive enough to say that if something can be distributed in a digital form it should be free but there needs to be some adaptation here,” Geekman added. For now, however, all the publishers see is a threat to their revenue stream, as Allan Ryan of Harvard Business Publishing put it: “We have been fairly vigorous in monitoring these sites and in requesting that they take down our copyrighted content.”
They sure have something to monitor now, as Textbook Torrents has made its return…because you still can’t torrent beer. Currently, the site can only be accessed directly via the IP-address, however, the domain should be working again shortly.
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42 Responses
being a student and surviving with side jobs is hard enough, add to that the huge fees collages take then again re-add the huge costs of textbooks and its just wayyy too much pressure for the average collage kid.
While i too do agree that a lot of great minds dedicate their time and energy into creating these books and should be compensated, theres got to be a limit as to the pricing of these books I also wonder how the money is distributed… i’m pretty sure the authors get shafted pretty bad as well, maybe not as bad as the recording companies shafting their artists because recording companies have proven time and again they are the biggest scumbags… but still pretty bad i’m sure.
The other thing to remember is that while music can be ignored and not taken, textbooks HAVE to be bought while studying… and screwing a captive audience is just wrong.
Just my $0.2c
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We must remember that the ultimate purpose of copyright law is not to serve the authors, the artists, or, especially so, the publishers. Copyright law exists strictly for the benefit of the public. It provides a carrot-on-a-stick that encourages authors to write and painters to paint, which then increases the amount of works in the public domain.
(What follows is more relevant to the US than most other countries, so please forgive me for this.)
The carrot is a /temporary/ monopoly on exploiting that work before it is allowed to fall into free use by the public (public domain). Here is the excerpt from the US Constitution that grants power to congress to create copyright law,
“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”
Note the part “limited times”.
Due mostly to changes in the 20th century, copyright law has left this original purpose and become a twisted corruption that does more harm to the public than good. If copyright extensions remain as they are now (which is unlikely), most works written and recorded today won’t be placed into public domain until your grandchildren are senior citizens. Many won’t fall into public domain until your great-grandchildren are senior citizens. This doesn’t serve you, the public, at all.
If the duration of copyright was more reasonable, say something like 10 years for books, then all those college books from the late nineties would be legal to share online. You would barely have anyone accusing anyone else of being a thief (which would fall into that faulty copyright infringement == theft propaganda anyway). It would be completely legal, and, since calculus hasn’t changed in the last 10 years, students would benefit from this without going into even further debt (part of the point of the late Textbook Torrents).
That’s what copyright *should* be. Limited times. Let copyright serve the public as it was intended to.
Something to note, though it is beyond the scope of my blog-comment rant, is that it was also designed with the idea in mind that only publishers had access to printing presses (and copyright took away rights the public couldn’t practice anyway). In only the last 15-20 years, we all have had printing presses in our homes (aka computers). This changes *everything* about how copyright should work.
My conclusion is that you should generally only worry about copyrights when you are facing dangerous legal consequences. Go ahead, make copies of that CD for your friends. Install that software on as many machines as you like. Copyright in its current form is extremely unjust and should be ignored.
Richard Stallman has a bunch of interesting essays on copyright (and bringing up his name sometimes makes people mad too). I would link them, but it would just look like comment-spam, so just Google it.
Wow, why hadn’t I considered the possibility of this in the past? This is certainly a necessity considering how criminally expensive these books are, and how the average college student graduates with around $20,000 of debt in the USA (land of the free – if you got the $$$). When you calculate how much these books cost you over the course of an education, it’s actually a very significant percentage of the cost.
Bravo to these guys! Keep up with the good work and don’t give up!
looking forward to seeing my textbooks for the fall on here!
I think that the problem is still in what they teach in schools and what is reported to newspapers.
Still all over, newspapers keep on treating file-sharing networks as “criminal gangs” and schools continually teach children that “file-sharing of copyrighted material is a BAD THING and is ILLEGAL.”
Letter-writing campaigns to the RIAA and to congress? Talk about ineffective. What is more effective is to write letters to newspapers and to schools, and to small groups and websites like commonsensemedia.org to try to get them to say the opposite of what they are saying now about file-sharing.
Why do BitTorrent trackers even need to store users’ IP addresses?
Emule can track uploads and downloads of connected network users by trading encryption keys. The only permanent records kept are logs for these user keys, which don’t include IP addresses. Emule has had this feature for many years.
It completely baffles me why private torrent trackers violate users’ privacy by logging IP information, when open-source identification-key solutions are readily available.
Bittorrent technology seems to be stuck in the stone age.
What is so great about this tracker? Textbooks are on every major torrent tracker like isohunt – why does anyone care about this? Articles don’t get into the “why” of it.
This tracker is much easier to find textbooks on, since it’s just for them. I use it not to get textbooks I currently need for classes, but to get textbooks on things that sound interesting. Being able to search by category is great.
I’d hate to be a student right now. In order to combat this, publishers will most likely come out with “new” editions of books more often than usual– students are going to see that their used books are worth less and less (and that new books are more pricey) if that holds true.
You know I’ve always hated the text book industry. Even more than the Music Industry. I remember when I was in Texas Tech they had this english class that was taught by this old boiler of a lady, but she had written the text book and it was only printed by the university. They charged $170 for that book. IT WAS JUST A NOTEBOOK WITH FREAKING WRITING IN IT! That’s right a freaking all paper no-harback 170 dollar book. What a freaking rip off! It’s such a racket!
The same happens with software… at even a GCSE level in the UK it’s impossible to own stuff like MS Access without torrents to do the coursework outside school.
Although I believe the Uni I’ll be attending in a while has an ‘online libary’ to browse through, so maybe I’ll do abit of uploading.
I can debate with the best of them for hours on end..
but everything considered.. I just disagree with copyright completly. It was made to protect artists, now it does everything but.
So I will download everything untill copyright dissapears.. chances of that happening? Almost zilch..
Im going to be downloading for a long time, if not forever, but thats ok with me, I get what I want and the companies still rob the stupid.. right now they still have it fat.. they shouldnt complain so much, its only going to make it worst.
hmmm..currently the ratio tracking feature still exists…
I wasn’t sure what was going on with that site since there wasn’t any “omg another raid” announcements here, I’m so glad it’s back. :)
Nice post @3. It’s very telling that copyright has been so corrupted in this country that very few people even know the intent of it anymore.
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By the way, DreamHost was only the domain registrar, so we never used them for any illegal purpose and they violated their own terms of use in suspending our account and locking us out of our domain. It’s still down as we’re working out some nameserver issues, but it will be back up shortly and you can access the site at http://85.17.226.223 in the meantime. (Note for the uninitiated: the regular domain is textbooktorrents.com.)
Jeez.
I think it’s great that someone has taken the initiative to offer textbooks. My gf’s at Uni, and I was amazed at the cost of a book. 1 book. That will last her a year. I think the most expensive one she bought was around £75, mibbe more. Anything she can, she buys second hand. Torrents would (and have been) a godsend ;).
BUT
My Aunt is in the process of co-writing a textbook with three other authors for an entire nation at the moment. She’s already a senior lecturer at a college, but took this up as a summer holiday project. It’s more difficult than you think.
And as a first time author, she gets 10p for every book sold. That’s it. There’s no end pay, no bonus. It’s purely from sales.
To be honest, this is the first time I’ve felt conflicted about filesharing. She’s a single parent, struggling to hold her head above water with the money she has. But, my Uncle was, and is, a successful musician. I couldn’t care less about him, because there’s royalties, radioplay, session deals (and legal seperation) etc. The musicians/directors do alright regardless of piracy. At worst, all it does is further the knowledge of your band’s existence.
Fucking over a first time author that’s given ten weeks of her life writing 15,000 words for a shit cause is a bit…
Meh.
good job Geekman especially with the move towards a public non-logging site. private sites are dangerous because they log and record member activity. the ratio many sites insist on using is ridiculous
for those interested in books h33t currently has 1,976 book torrents. i mention this because there are a couple of book uploaders who are nothing less than totally amazing and well worth a quick look
h33t is hosted in a country where bittorrent is legal
http://www.h33t.com where filesharing is an education
“i mention this because there are a couple of book uploaders who are nothing less than totally amazing and well worth a quick look”
like tqw :P
“h33t is hosted in a country where bittorrent is legal”
Where is BitTorrent illegal?
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Yay, now I get to waste even more time looking for my text books on this tracker, only to find that NONE of them are there.
In my 5 semesters so far as a college student, not one of my books has shown up on textbooktorrents. Not even really old versions of my text books. Nothing remotely close to my text books. In fact, I did a fairly comprehensive search of BT sites and search engines for my books each semester, and only once have I ever found a match… and that was on The Pirate Bay.
Nevertheless…
If this tracker can gain enough popularity, perhaps some day enough people will upload their books so that I could possibly find one I’m actually looking for…
But I fear this won’t come for years, at which point it will do me no good.
@22
And how many of YOUR textbooks did you scan and then upload to help correct that problem?
I thought so.
@ TheYunvus
If that was the case, I’m hoping you found your books and uploaded them TTB to save the next guy from having the same problem.
A site is only as good as it’s supporters.
@ h33t
H33T has good torrents but it’s a terrible site… adverts on a page are nessecary but h33t has more pop-ups than a porn tracker, lol
@23 & 24
I’ll have you know that I have scanned a number of my text books and uploaded them to TPB.
But I stopped actually buying them about a semester or two ago, when I realized that I never actually use them anyway.
We share textbooks(real or digital) for the love of sharing information and spreading education in every corner of d planet , n frankly i don care if in the process such BS copyright laws get violated…
Fuck patents. Limit copyrights to 2 years.
@21 tracker servers do not host copyright material and it is not absolutely necessary to remove a torrent upon receipt of a take down request because it is not yet possible to copyright a torrent. of course this only applies if the tracker is hosted in a country where bittorrent is legal and i was speaking from the tracker operator point of view. as you correctly infer, bittorrent as a protocol is not illegal anywhere
@25 agreed adverts sux and pop-unders are the worse. we have to pay the bills and an ad blocker will solve the problem for anyone who is offended by adverts
Just so most folks know – the book costs aren’t all that crazy (still high) – let me explain.
Given a book ZZTop with a publishers price of $50. Now most hardbacks in bookstores sell for in the $20 range, but the audience is huge compared to textbooks. From this we see that maybe the $50 price isn’t too bad.
Now we the campus bookstore buys the book, and doubles the price (more or less). So now the $50 book is $100!
That $50 is “overhead”, and IMHO is where too much of the cost of books is being created. Not that the publishers don’t start this by charging more for the base book cost, but hey, selling a book for 10000 students is more expensive than selling a mediocre fiction book to 200,000 people.
FWIW I don’t have any books in print and am moving slowly to all my own material just to avoid having my students spend waaaay to much money on books. Spend it on coffee and stay awake in class instead.
Nice rant, Doom. I agree.
@ 19 (concerned)… I think you hit the nail on the head. Your aunt gets a whole 10p a copy? Where’s the rest of it going? Research? Hah!
That sounds like a bad deal. Should everyone pay 75 pounds for a book when the author is barely compensated? I feel badly for your aunt, but the other 74.90 is a little hard to swallow. Give me her address and I will send her a shiny Canadian Loonie. No sarcasm intended.
“@21 tracker servers do not host copyright material and it is not absolutely necessary to remove a torrent upon receipt of a take down request because it is not yet possible to copyright a torrent. of course this only applies if the tracker is hosted in a country where bittorrent is legal and i was speaking from the tracker operator point of view. as you correctly infer, bittorrent as a protocol is not illegal anywhere”
Yeah, I knew that and I knew that you knew that – I just wanted to make sure that the general TF reading population knew that :)
Textbook publishers and many university professors are to be blamed for this state of affairs regarding college / university textbooks.
Textbook publishers make a lot of profitablemoney on these textbooks, and many students just keep struggling with higher tuition prices, and exorbitant textbook prices.
Sometimes professors require that the poor student buy an expensive textbook, and it’s hardly used–except a few chapters.
Now these big publisher companies and some author professors see P2P as an intrusion to their profits.
Well, in a sentence, welcome to the world of P2P in the 21st century.
Dang… I’ve searched for my textbooks every single semester and not only never found them, but never found this site, either!
Lol…torrent beer n_n.
I love you torrentfreak.
“And as a first time author, she gets 10p for every book sold. That’s it. There’s no end pay, no bonus. It’s purely from sales.”
And the goal should be to get her share increased greatly, and the overall price reduced too.
Someone is making a lot of money from your aunt’s hard work and compensating her well below what she deserves. That is the basis of capitalism, unfortunately.
Cool I need a site like this. I need to start reading some text books to be really become intellectually intelligent instead of using google all the time to look smart.
I can understand students’ frustrations, but having worked in the textbook publishing industry for 20 years, I can also see the publishers’ point of view. The more outlandish claims that textbooks are hugely overpriced is often just that, an unfounded, exaggerated claim by people ignorant of the publishing process. It costs a *lot* of money to make a textbook. First is the cost of developing manuscript. That includes getting market reviews by students and faculty and experts in a given field or authors who have already published in a given field. You do this to flesh out what the content of the book will be. What’s lacking in existing textbooks, incorporating new information and advancements in a given field. Those people have to get paid. Sometimes just the upfront “manuscript preparation” part alone can cost several thousand dollars. Then you have to set aside art development money. And that ain’t cheap either. There’s paying a photographer (and often models) for a photo shoot for the photographs you see in books. Or paying someone else a royalty to use existing photographs (stock photos, for instance). Illustrations? Someone has to create them, and that costs money. You pay anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars for each individual illustration. Art creation costs can run from a few hundred to a hundred thousand dollars per BOOK, depending on how complex the art is. There’s money needed to get permission from other publishers to re-use their material in your book. For a first edition, there are often development costs, and those costs can run into the upper thousands. Once you have all the manuscript, then you have to have someone copyedit it. That costs money. Then you have to pay someone to typeset all of it. That too costs a LOT of money. (The cost of paper alone is nearly obscene.) Then the proofreading costs. Next, printer costs. Warehouse costs. The costs involved to hire someone to create a cover design. For someone to write the copy that goes on the back cover. I would say the average textbook, the budget for one is probably anywhere from $20,000 to well over $100,000. And most books probably need to have a profit margin of around at least 27% or the publisher won’t make any money on the book, and then what’s the point of publishing it at all? All of the books I’ve worked on over the years, for discussion purposes here, say the unit cost for a book (i.e., what it costs the publisher to make and produce that book) is $15.00. The book will be priced at $60.00. So that’s a $45 profit per book. Sounds good, right? Until you figure back in what it costs you to get wholesalers and distributors to buy your books. And what if the book doesn’t sell a lot of copies? Unsold copies are returned to the publisher, so the publisher absorbs those costs, which can be huge if a book tanks.
Many college campus bookstores jack up the price on textbooks over what the publisher sets, so that they make a profit too. And they can charge anything they want. So a lot of the time, people should be blaming their campus bookstores, not the publisher.
Where I have a problem with the ever-increasing cost of books is in how the process of making them has changed. Almost all publishers outsource as much of the work as possible overseas. Where before they paid, say, am experienced U.S. copyeditor $20 an hour to copyedit a book, now they can get an Indian person to do it (and generally it’s someone with very little to NO experience in publishing) for $2.00 an hour. Publishers are realizing huge savings by offshoring a lot of the work, but they sure aren’t passing that savings on to consumers or to their own employees. That is what irks me. But half the reason (savings aren’t passed on) is most publishing companies are publicly held. And shareholders aren’t happy if they don’t see the value of their stock going up, up, up. Often unrealistically so. (Too, publishers, like any business, pay monstrous money in health insurance for their employees, which is a whole ‘nother discussion.)
So the next time someone wants to complain about the cost of a textbook, stop and think about all the variables involved. Where do you think the money in your 401K comes from? Stocks in companies like book publishers. And stocks that don’t keep increasing will be dropped (in turn, people buy less stock or sell off their existing stock, which brings the value of the company down, etc.)
I think the entire commerce system needs to be modernized. If we don’t, and if we don’t institute a fairer, equitable distribution of profits and wealth, future generations will pay the price, even more than we’re paying. And that’s a sad and preventable thing.
“My Aunt is in the process of co-writing a textbook with three other authors for an entire nation at the moment. She’s already a senior lecturer at a college, but took this up as a summer holiday project. It’s more difficult than you think.
And as a first time author, she gets 10p for every book sold. That’s it. There’s no end pay, no bonus. It’s purely from sales.”
Frankly, it sounds like the problem is with your aunt. She wasn’t forced to sign the publishing contract (which details the royalty rate). If she couldn’t negotiate better terms for her share of the royalties, then she should have declined. It’s also not uncommon for an author on a first edition to get a lower-than-usual royalty rate. After all, all the risk is on the publisher. The author loses no money if the book doesn’t sell. Generally, the royalty rate increases with subsequent editions, if the book sells well. (Most textbooks are on a 3- to 4-year revision cycle.) And if a given textbook does exceptionally well, then the author has the leverage next time around to bump up their royalty rate.
Did your aunt have a lawyer look over the contract before she signed it? Like any contract, I’d imagine, a publishing contract is pretty complicated. Royalty rates are variable. Often, there’s one rate for the first, say, 5,000 copies sold. A different rate kicks in above 5,000 copies. Too, royalty rates can differ depending on whether (and how many sold) they are sold domestically (i.e., in the United States) or internationally. And too, and perhaps most importantly, is whether any royalties are paid based on the LIST price of a book, or the net price, etc. Any author should have a lawyer meticulously review a contract before signing it. Because once you sign in, there’s no going back and changing things.
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