Hot trends watch: Textbook Torrents

Textbook Torrents, a Web directory of questionable legality that lets users download digital versions of schoolbooks, got plenty of attention from curious Web surfers Tuesday, hitting No. 21 on Google's hot list after a feature was published on Slashdot.

They probably could have done without one group noticing the service, however: Pearson Education, a major textbook publisher which holds the copyright for many files the site serves.

The file-sharing tracker removed 78 links to digital books at the request of Pearson, according to a posting on Textbook Torrents' home page. The loss is only a drop in the bucket of the site's directory of about 6,000 PDF, text and image files, however.

Site administrator Geekman said he was contacted by e-mail last Thursday with the content removal request, but waited until today to respond so he could verify that it truly came from the copyright holder, he said. The Slashdot story, which doesn't mention the spat with the Upper Saddle River, N.J.-based publisher, was unrelated to the legal confrontation, Geekman assures the site's 64,000 users.

Geekman, who remains anonymous to protect himself from such legal clashes as this, started Textbook Torrents in January 2007 to strike back at the textbook industry's steep pricing, a common complaint among college students. His e-mail response to Pearson reflected this sentiment.

"Sadly, the organization you represent is engaged in monopolistic practices and extortion of those least able to pay. Students have no choice but to purchase the textbooks that their professors assign, and have no choice but to pay the exorbitant prices you set. You print money, not textbooks. I would love to live in a world where the question of unfairly-priced textbooks would be met with uncomprehending looks and Textbook Torrents collected dust. Unfortunately, neither of us live in that world. Until you reach the understanding that we must meet in the middle, where you exhibit reasonable business practices and respect for the students you purport to serve, Textbook Torrents will exist, and more will follow in its wake."

Geekman's residence outside the United States affords him some legal shelter, as the Pirate Bay file-sharing collective has shown, but he yielded to the publisher's request "as a professional courtesy," he said. "I would love to come up swinging if I had the resources for sufficient legal representation," he wrote in an e-mail.

"I know that we have received a great deal of attention as a result of this exchange with Pearson," Geekman said. "Ironically, I think they've shot themselves in the foot by putting the spotlight on a site that has until now been something of an underground movement."

It's an interesting argument that by trying to prevent the piracy of its content, one publisher has singlehandedly planted the seeds for a hefty harvest of textbook downloads. But Textbook Torrents' 64,000 users aren't small potatoes.

-- Mark Milian

Comments

[Jock]

Way to go Geeks