Pirate Service Makes Textbook Rentals Last Forever

[nsane.forums]

The ever-rising costs of textbooks is an unavoidable nightmare for many students and hot-topic to those who see the system as corrupt. Now, a site with a mission to dismantle what they say amounts to a publishing monopoly has come up with another solution to bring cheap and free textbooks to students. The publishers are going to hate it but the site doesn’t care. They insist that it’s students that are being abused by publishers, not the other way round.

During August, just before the start of the new school term, we reported on LibraryPirate, a site with a mission of providing college students with an alternative to continuously rising textbook prices. Bemoaning what he sees as greedy profiteering, LibraryPirate’s admin says the year-old site’s aim is clear.

“Our mission is simple and specific,” he told TorrentFreak. “To revolutionize the digital e-textbook industry and change it permanently.”

Now the site is stepping up its assault against “textbook monopolists” by offering a brand new service to not only reduce the costs of digital textbook rentals, but to turn that temporary access to an educational necessity into permanent ownership.

The initiative the site is running is called “Hire-a-Pirate” and the publishers aren’t going to like it one bit. Many students, on the other hand, won’t share their view. This is how it works.

First, the student lets LibraryPirate know the title of the book they’re looking for. Then, site staff locate the product on eTextbook rental services and advise the student of the current rental price. An example shown to us was a book costing $200, but with a time-limited digital rental copy also available at $118.50.

Participating students are then asked to purchase a gift certificate from the official seller for the full amount ($118.50 in our example) and send the gift code to LibraryPirate. Site staff then rent the book on the student’s behalf.

“After a little bit of this and a little of that, we strip the DRM from the PDF and contact the user letting them know the book is ready via torrent,” says LP’s admin. “The student can now carry the textbook with them anywhere for as long as they want, allowing the PDF to be easily read on any device.”

The idea is that not only does a rental copy get turned into the unrestricted real thing, but students can choose to split the cost of obtaining a book between friends – 10 friends contributing means just $11.85 each. For future students, however, the cost of obtaining the same book reduces to zero.

“Every textbook purchased through the Hire-a-Pirate program will be added to the LibraryPirate torrent database. If you do not have time to scan books, this is an excellent way to help the cause and save money at the same time,” adds LP.

However, for those who have hard copies already, the time to take a few photographs and a desire to share, LibraryPirate have just released a new tool to make eBook creation a lot more simple.

LPBR is a piece of software created by LP member RiddleRiot which turns any digital camera into “a lean mean textbook scanning machine.”

After placing the book on a black background and photographing its pages, a couple of clicks later and an eBook comes out the other end.

“LPBR will crop, sharpen and re-size the entire folder of camera scan images into one easily readable PDF book,” says TP’s admin. “It’s so easy to scan a textbook now, even a college student can do it. During our testing, we were able to scan and convert one 500 page book in under 2 hours.”

Of course, with both the Rent-a-Pirate service and the LPBR software, what we’re looking at here is copyright infringement, but LP’s admin insists that since students are being abused by a broken education system that leaves them no other option than to spend ridiculous sums of money on textbooks, there is only “one path to moral high ground.”

The “private theft of education” must be combated, he concludes, and that can only come about by striking the monopolies where it counts – in their pocketbooks.

So, is ripping DRM from textbooks and sharing them for the purposes of gaining an education more morally acceptable than doing the same with movies, music and games? Or is it just an elaborate excuse to frame copyright infringement in a righteous manner?

What comes first, the rights of the publishers or the need for a fairer system towards educational enlightenment?

It’s an interesting point for debate, and one we encourage in the comment section below.

View: Original Article

[Ambrocious]

If there is a goal to have a not only a "great" nation but a good nation, this is the focal point: books and other sources to educate the public should be inexpensive and not bound by harsh rules to oppress knowledge and the spread thereof. If the leaders of a country wishes to oppress the people, they need only to restrict understanding and the free flow thereof and overprice everything...as they are currently doing. Common sense says that this goes beyond a monopoly, this is a strangulation on liberty it's self. We need to get better as mankind entire. Knowledge and common sense is needed greatly.

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president of the United States of America

[CODYQX4]

It's definitely a corrupt system. They churn out a new edition every year, and colleges then refuse to buyback the old edition. You have to use the latest edition to use online features, which the companies reward colleges to push their latest crap, and most new editions are just reorganized with slightly different problems. Why the hell would a yearly calculus book be pushed, when calculus has been the same for 300 years?

Thank god I got a full scholarship, someone else buys them and I sell them back at a pittance (half usually), but it is still 100% profit on my end. The colleges work together with the book companies, and they sell the books at their own book store for more than at Amazon, because if any student has any aid money left after the tuition, they let you use it on their books, so they can bleed you dry. Somehow I managed to beat the system and not owe 1 million dollars and my soul to some corrupt company to go to college, but everyone else I see is getting raped by these scumbags. New versions push costs higher in other places, all on the student. Trust me the colleges are profiting on this, if they weren't they'd do something (not force use the latest edition for no beneficial reason), but they encourage it because they make money as well.

... and all this is public knowledge printed out (or even an ebook yet they somehow charge just a little less), but copyright lets these degenerates hold it hostage and sell old information at $150 for a new copy. Let this site spit in the face of the textbook companies.