Students Trade "Pirated" Digital Textbooks on Regular Basis

Some of us might not be surprised that students have developed an under-the-radar trading system for textbooks, which we all know are usually outrageously priced.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/07/18/textbooks_free_and_illegal_online/

The phenomena, posted in an article on Boston.com, quotes a publishing manager from Farmington Hills, Michigan who asserts that 200-300 of his company's titles are illegally published per month.

The article goes on to state: "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."

My perspective on this is that we've been saying for years the economic model of the traditional publication industry must change. If the publication industry won't change on their own initiative, users will effectuate that change for them. It also makes me think of the recent study I completed that was the foundation for my PhD dissertation. In that study I found that US copyright law did not have the agency many presuppose that it has at least among the digital writers I studied (who were also students). These practices by students in some sense achieve a certain kind of fairness or justice, as the high price of textbooks tries to compensate for digital piracy by others (as well as the basic affordances of digital technology which often negates the need for textbooks in the first place). If prices are going to set boundaries for who can and cannot partake of higher education in the US, "students" are going to take matters into their own hands, apparently. I cannot blame them. If a reasonable solution isn't offered by those with proprietary interests, users will force a solution through their own behaviours. The law isn't what it is, it's what people enact it to be.