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Online Textbook Piracy: A Literature Review
Jeremy Cusker
Associate Librarian
Engineering Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
jpc27@cornell.edu
Abstract
The piracy of academic textbooks is neither more nor less complex than is piracy of most other forms of digital content. Much has been written about digital piracy in general but rather less about the specific topic of piracy of electronic academic texts. Hence, the literature review below, which collects what has been written to date on this subject. As a somewhat 'up to the minute' topic, much relevant literature exists only in the form of blog posts and popular-press articles, although the academic journal press is also taking note. It is at least in part to unify these perspectives that we have compiled this review. Technical details, current information on litigation, alternatives to piracy, and analyses of the ethical and social-psychological aspects of digital piracy among students are all discussed.
Introduction
If it can be reduced to ones and zeroes, it can almost certainly be pirated1. This is the bitter lesson to which virtually all 'cultural' industries have found themselves subject for nearly 20 years now. Beginning with the music industry's fateful encounter with Napster and other file-sharing sites and protocols and continuing through the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) technological and legal efforts to bring down 'torrenting' sites and networks, content piracy has continued unabated. The truth seems to be that there is no legal regime, law enforcement campaign or technological development capable of reining in content piracy for long. Indeed, it is now almost easier than ever for someone to either offer or obtain a piece of cultural material--a piece of music, a film, television program, video game, comic, or book--and no money need change ever change hands, certainly not with the content's original creator or publisher. At the time of this writing, online piracy is still expanding into new genres of exploitable content. Much has been made of Alexandra Elbakyan's Scihub web site for piracy of scientific journal articles (as well as Aaron Swartz' earlier effort to 'liberate' similar content). Makers of tabletop wargaming figures must now perform regular sweeps of sites that share specifications for 3D printing and issue takedown notices for postings that violate their copyrights. And as the number of printable substrates for 3D printing multiply, there is now speculation that the next frontier for online piracy will be in the realm of pharmaceuticals.
And all of this is true not just for hackers or technically savvy individuals but for anyone of even middling skills and equipped with only basic computing equipment.
The piracy of academic textbooks is neither more nor less complex than is piracy of most other forms of digital content. Modern textbooks tend to integrate large numbers of diagrams, formulae, and full-color images along with textual information. They tend also to be lengthy, often 500 to 1,000 pages or more. But the proliferation of high-resolution flatbed scanners and high speed Internet connections makes it possible to generate good quality scans directly from a hard copy of a text. Adobe's durable, flexible Portable Document Format (PDF) specification (now standardized as ISO 32000-1) is generally the preferred medium for such documents.
Even simpler for pirates are those cases in which digital copies of a textbook are produced by publishers themselves (as 'born digital' e-books or e-book editions of print books). Such e-books are usually protected by some form of authentication or Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. But easily available software exists to overcome such restrictions. With the text thus in either case 'liberated' as a DRM-free, infinitely shareable electronic file, the textbook can be shared among friends, reposted to wikis and servers, stored and transported on all manner of portable storage media and, most threatening to publishers, made available to anyone via file-sharing client extensions like torrents or else through older, non-Internet platforms like Usenet or Tor.
Much has been written about digital piracy in general but rather less about the specific topic of piracy of electronic academic texts. Hence, the literature review below--which I have broken into categories for clarity and ease of reference--collects what has been written to date on this subject. As a somewhat 'up to the minute' topic, much relevant literature exists only in the form of blog posts and popular-press articles, although the academic journal press is also taking note. It is at least in part to unify these perspectives that we have compiled this review.
Literature Review
General and Monographic Discussions of Digital Piracy
Stephen Witt's 2015 New Yorker article "The Man Who Broke the Music Industry" (shortly thereafter expanded as a book-length treatment How Music Got Free) traced the early history of Internet media piracy, beginning with 'ripped' music from just one individual working at one CD factory (Witt 2015a; 2015b). The article traces the evolution of such piracy towards other forms of media (specifically, movies) but does not mention the more-recent phenomena of e-book piracy. The book devotes only marginally more attention to this more-recent area of digital piracy. Nevertheless, it remains a worthwhile preface to current study of the landscape of digital piracy and of corporations' and the government's effort to tamp down on the phenomena.
Over a decade ago from the time of this writing, Siva Vaidynathan's book The Anarchist in the Library likewise served as a broad introduction to the evolution of copyright and copyright violation in the digital age. Vaidhyanathan introduced and refined several important ideas and observations, including that large-scale holders-of-copyright in the digital era were themselves moving away from reliance on copyright (or at least, copyright alone) to secure their property, in preference to licensing and Digital Rights Management. He also described an idea he called a 'global jukebox' or 'Celestial Jukebox' as being the implied end-goal of many copyright-holding corporations. This he defined as the almost infinite granularity--and monetary metering--of access to all content which would, concomitantly, be perfectly secure and invulnerable to piracy:
"Once the infrastructure was built . . . distributing each song [or any other piece of content], would cost the industry almost nothing. No one would be able to copy these songs without going to extreme measures . . . One of the central principles of information policy during the 1990s focused on the idea of bringing smaller and smaller "works"--a song instead of an album, an article instead of a magazine, a single film in lieu of a movie channel subscription--to consumers. In turn, consumers would pay a flexible, metered price for access to the materials."
When The Anarchist in the Library was written, the iTunes store was just 3 years old and sold only music. Its growth and expansion into the sale of movies, TV shows, books, and other media and the appearance of competitor shops run by Google, Amazon, and others had not yet occurred. There are not even any entries for 'books' or 'e-books' in the book's index. Yet the Vaidhyanathan's observations were prescient and certainly bear relevance for looking at piracy of academic texts.
Specific Discussions on E-Book Piracy
The specific research on digital textbook piracy is quite new, self-consciously so in some cases. The independently published white paper "Understanding Textbook Piracy" (Rebelo 2015) states quite clearly in its introduction:
"While there is a growing literature on the consequences of the digitization of entertainment media (music, movies, etc.), there is much less research on the effect of the digitization of books. In part this scarcity of research reflects the fact that books have more recently been made available in digital form ... This paper focuses on an important subset of the publishing industry: the textbook industry, which for decades has curated students' learning experiences at all grade levels."
Indeed, even quite recent discussions of digital piracy, supposedly covering the entire gamut of pirate-able media types, often lack any discussion of electronic textbook (or even just e-book) piracy (see for instance Peitz and Waelbroeck (2006)), simply because the phenomena is so new.
Rebelo's paper covers numerous sub-topics of interest, among which is that academic texts are sought out and 'consumed' on a basis different from that of the other usual targets of digital piracy--movies, music, games, etc.--which can all be grouped as 'entertainment.' Digital textbooks, by contrast, are aids to academic study, which students are generally required to read (at least if they want to get a good grade). This conclusion is in turn based upon an earlier paper by Scorcu and Vici, who note that the 'compulsory' character of textbook reading seems to obviate any 'cultural value' of textbooks in the eyes of many students, including many of those who admit to pirating them (Scorcu and Vici 2013).
At the time of this writing, Rebelo's paper is perhaps the best available description of the overall phenomena of digital textbook piracy. This is our own admittedly subjective judgment: The primary research thrust of Rebelo is social-psychological, dealing primarily with the motivations of students who decide to pirate (or not pirate) e-textbooks. The portions describing the phenomena itself are primarily found within the introduction and conclusion. At the time of this writing, the paper is not highly cited within Google Scholar (indeed, the only responsive papers for the search "textbook piracy" with a significant numbers of hits are two pieces on open textbooks (Baker et al 2009; 37 cites) and social bookmarking (Farwell et al. 2010; 19 cites), neither of which specifically treat of textbook piracy except perhaps to speculate that their topics might be used to combat such piracy).
As an interesting aside, Farwell et al cites an article from Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Bulletin that might also bear relevance to this topic ("Online piracy working group promoting best practices for sites to prevent illegal file sharing" (AAP 2009)) but which cannot, to the best of this author's ability, be located by any means. The PSP Bulletin is an entirely electronic publication and no backfiles older than 2012 are maintained by any library in Worldcat. The American Association of Publishers, when contacted, was unable to provide any copy of this article or of the issue of the Bulletin in which it supposedly appeared. Efforts to find the content of this publication via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine were likewise unsuccessful. This represents an interesting case of Internet 'memory loss.'
Psychological and Ethical Discussions
One interesting genre of articles regarding textbook piracy comes from the psychological literature, specifically from the study of emotions and ethics. That is: How do students feel about pirating such content and how do they ethically justify committing the illegal act of doing so? While these articles might not seem fully relevant to this review, they include a number of interesting secondary findings regarding the motivations behind piracy.
Much social-psychological and ethical research has been done on the motivations of those who engage in digital piracy in general (rather than piracy of academic texts in particular). Most of the findings of this genre of research are in line with intuition: Individuals who expressed less concern for moral behavior or thought or who perceive that their peers are accepting of such actions are more likely to engage in digital piracy in general. This was the finding of Al Rafee and Cronan (2006) to give only one example among many.
On the topic of piracy of academic texts in specific, there exists less research: of the few papers that exist, many are de novo explorations of the field, citing only general research on either ethical decision making and/or digital piracy in general in their bibliographies. That said, their findings generally track with that of the broader field. Su, et al. (2011) hypothesized and then confirmed direct relationships between intention to pirate a text and several other factors including cost of the texts, anticipated benefits (viz. shortened time to acquire the texts), ease of opportunity to pirate texts, and level of approval among peers. In all such cases, the effects of these factors were partially mediated by anticipatory guilt of the individual.
McCorkle et al's (2012) development of a model of consumer behavior regarding the decision to either purchase or pirate electronic content included a brief mention of electronic textbook piracy. The upshot of that paper was that no single model of consumer behavior can be described at this point: that there exist distinct consumer cultures with varying levels of willingness to engage in piracy. With regard to textbook piracy, McCorkle noted that earlier investigations of ethical behavior--such as the resale of examination copies of textbooks distributed for free to instructors--may not fully inform current behavioral research: That the technology of electronic piracy is so ubiquitous, anonymous, and possesses such low barriers to entry that it may invite unethical behavior even on the part of those who would never engage in the sale of illegal physical goods.
As with Su, Camarero, et al (2013) found that an individual's ethical acceptance of piracy hinged heavily on the ease of opportunity to do so, especially if their own perception of the technology involved was that it was easy to use. That is, the better an individual's grasp of P2P, torrenting or other such means of filesharing was, the more likely they were to engage in textbook piracy. Another positive correlation was found between individuals' perception of the usefulness and/or acceptability of textbooks in electronic format as a substitute for hardcopies and their willingness to pirate. Finally, Camerero et al. noted that among a majority of students surveyed, there was an expectation that e-textbooks should cost approximately 50% what hardcopy books do (which, they noted, represents a fairly accurate guess of the expense saved of not having to print and physically distribute them) whereas in practice they usually cost 70 to 80% of what hardcopies do, and that this disparity--a clear case of rent-seeking in textbook markets--further motivated feelings of the ethical acceptability of textbook piracy among students.
Dionisio et al (2013) made similar findings to Camerero et al. but expanded the number of factors considered to include gender, age, educational stage, family income, impressions of one's own country's economic status and, perhaps most important, perceived legal risk. Upon these axes, statistical findings of note included that females were modestly less likely to engage in textbook piracy; that students closer to graduation were more likely to engage in piracy; and that students who perceived the economic status of their country as being poor or troubled were more likely to engage in piracy.
How-To's: Finding and Creating Torrents
For those not fully conversant with the technology: a 'torrent' is a non-Internet online protocol whereby users share files 'peer to peer' (P2P). The users need not know anything about each other or ever speak; they simply participate jointly in the network and the files stored locally on each of their computers are made available to each other via an intermediating torrenting program (and they need not be using the same one). The torrent itself does not contain the content to be shared: It is rather just a metadata sequence for identifying the file to others as well as cryptographic values for ensuring integrity of the file. Any individual torrent might be hosted by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of users simultaneously, with the torrent requested by an individual 'fulfilled' by some or all of them. Thus, the ability to obtain a torrent quickly is a function not only of bandwidth but of the number of users offering a file.
Basic introductions to the techniques of obtaining files via torrenting are manifold on the Internet, many of them flogging specific torrenting clients (viz. desktop or, increasingly, browser-based programs for managing one's torrenting activity). Some, more helpfully, compare and contrast various clients (Henry 2011). As with many discussions in software development, the currency of such pieces drops off rapidly with time.
Sites which prominently host torrents (which, to emphasize, does not mean that those sites are offering files, but rather directions to those files) are natural targets for legal action by rights-holders and consequently for very public 'takedowns.' This has been the fate of Napster and The Pirate Bay with other similar sites like Isohunt likewise engaged in a continual struggle with such parties over the rather tenuous legality of their operations.
The majority of participants in P2P networks are content to share and download torrents originally created by others. However for those interested in creating new torrents, the site Lifehacker also has a number of straightforward guides (Ho 2010).
One relatively new development in the area of 'torrenting' is that of what some authors refer to as BitTorrent 'darknets.' Zhang et al.'s paper (2010) examined these communities, noting that they limit membership, often by requiring a would-be member to upload new files before extending an invitation. In many cases, total membership is limited: New members can only join when old ones are kicked off. Total uploading and downloading are also often tracked, with members of the darknet banned if they download much more than they upload or if they do not regularly contribute new content, sometimes referred to as 'ratio incentive.' The appeal of these communities is enhanced by the actions of the administrators, who may remove low-quality or low-popularity torrents. This 'curation' service gives added value to the darknet. Aside from contributing this introduction, much of the remainder of Zhang et al.'s paper consists of proposed methodologies and metrics for estimating the size and level of activity of the torrent darknet 'ecosystem' (Zhang et al. 2010).
For the purposes of this review, we shall here conclude our discussion of the means of file sharing with the modern torrent client-and-extension format. However, it is worth mentioning that there also exist other, older, non-Internet technologies that can facilitate anonymous file sharing, most notably Usenet and Tor ("The Onion Router"). These technologies not only anonymize file sharing activity but conceal it from Internet service providers (ISPs), who can otherwise detect torrenting activity and have been known to attenuate an offending user's bandwidth accordingly. By definition and design, it is very difficult to know how much piracy goes on via Usenet or Tor, in textbooks or in anything else. But anecdotally, this user found it possible to locate freely available downloads of several current academic texts on these networks.
How-To's: Removing or Circumventing E-Book DRM
Removing or circumventing DRM from electronic texts, regardless of their format, is not difficult. In the case of texts scanned from hard copies, it is a complete non-issue. But even for commercially produced 'born digital' electronic textbooks, evasion of software-based anti-piracy regimes is easy and the more common a textbook's format, the easier it is. This is particularly true when it comes to the 'big three' commercial e-book formats: Kindle, ePub and Adobe PDF. The usual mechanism by which such software operates is to restrict use of an e-book to a small number of devices (perhaps even just one).
Innumerable online guides exist to describe how this software might be defeated, usually using independently produced anti-DRM software available for free download. To give just one example, the technology and lifestyle blog Lifehacker has two excellent how-to entries on defeating ebook DRM (Ravenscraft 2014; Klosowski 2012). In these and other blogs and papers, a fig leaf of legality or at least ethicality is placed over the discussion by claiming the techniques and tools described are intended only to allow for easier use of content one has already legally purchased (although such reverse-engineering is itself often proscribed by end-user agreements). There is a usually a winking mention that, however easy it might be to apply this technology to pirated content, the authors cannot condone such a use case.
Postscript: Alternatives to Piracy and Extortionate Textbook Pricing
From an economist's point of view the textbook market is at risk for rent-seeking: Although students have some options in terms of vendor (i.e. they can buy from a campus book store, from other book stores, or they can buy online), they are generally constrained to purchase one highly specific item, produced in limited quantities by specialized vendors. That item generally has a limited shelf life before being replaced by a newer version, which causes a severe drop-off in the price of the previous edition2. Certainly the trend in the price of university-level textbooks over the years 1978 to 2012 bears that out, rising 812% in that period, over three times the rate of core inflation (Perry 2012).
Alternatives to this pricing schema--and to the side-effect of online piracy described in this review--have been in development in response to this phenomenon. Educators and nonprofit organizations have pioneered various types of 'open' educational resources (OER), available for free as an alternative to traditional college textbooks. These efforts are often conceived-of as a means of supporting education in poorer, developing nations. But there is little reason why the resources thus developed could not be used by students in richer nations as well.
Beyond the creation and curation of de novo educational material however, some OER projects specifically correlate their own content to that of traditional textbooks written and sold for profit. As one article describes the practice,
"So if you've been assigned to read Chapter 4 ("Principles of Supply and Demand") of [economist] N. Gregory Mankiw's [textbook Principles of Economics (price USD $293.00)], you can simply head to Boundless and get free content that covers that same ideas and concepts, optimized for your tablet or e-reader. For students stocking up on textbooks for their spring 2013 classes, that sounds pretty appealing." (Carey 2012).
The web site Boundless (a start-up rather than a nonprofit itself) engaged most explicitly in this tactic, with some observers even saying their resources amounted to publishing the "Boundless version" of given commercial textbooks. Certainly the textbook publishing industry saw it that way when it sued Boundless in late 2012 (Carey), alleging copyright infringement. That lawsuit was eventually disposed-of in a confidential settlement whose terms are unclear, except insofar as Boundless remains in operation, paid a relatively nominal monetary sum to the plaintiffs, and no longer seems to directly refer to the content of commercial textbooks (viz. no longer offers 'aligned' content) (Boundless 2016; Feldstein 2014).
Postscript: Piracy of Scientific Journal Articles
As noted above, there seems to be no form of licensed or monetized digital content that will not eventually be pirated online. As recently as 2005 or 2006, it seemed that movies, music, and games represented the limit of pirate-able content, but the advent of e-books as a viable format since that time has proven that wrong. As of the time of this writing, there is much discussion about a new piratical venture, Scihub, a resource built by Kazakh graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan (Oxenham 2016). By use of passwords given to her illicitly by academic researchers at larger, better-funded institutions than her own, Elbakyan batch-downloaded a huge corpus of scientific journal articles. Swiftly targeted for legal action by major scientific publishers, Scihub was re-hosted to the remote British Indian Ocean Territory and remains freely accessible at the time of this writing (Scihub 2016).
The specific landscape of the scientific journal world is beyond the scope of this paper (and may indeed be quite familiar to many readers already). It is merely worth noting that this specific act of piracy both targets a heretofore un-exploited type of content (scientific journal articles) and that it represents something of a technological throwback in its implementation: Scihub does not use any form of P2P protocol but rather is the product of one individual armed with many freely contributed authentication profiles and passwords and a single online repository, which has so far escaped adjudication more through geography rather than technology. That content publishers have not been able to stem even this rather old-fashioned act of digital theft merely reinforces that there are few meaningful legal or technical safeguards which pirates cannot overcome.
Discussion and Conclusion
As stated before, legal and technical campaigns against content piracy have generally failed to keep pace with piratical activity. It is simply too easy and too rewarding for its practitioners to be suppressed for long. To the extent that content creators (not necessarily the same as publishers or other 'business' interests) have had any success in protecting their livelihoods against the threat of online piracy, it has primarily been through adoption of new models for compensation such as crowdfunding by which funds are raised 'up front,' usually prior to completion or even initiation of a particular work, or even 'pay-what-you-want' models in which aficionados of a particular artist, writer, or other creator are invited to pay what they feel is justified for a particular work.
More conventionally, some observers have also pointed to the advent of large-scale Internet content 'shops' wherein consumers can easily, seamlessly, securely purchase digital content as a factor militating against piracy. By lowering the barriers (not least of which being price) to legal purchase of electronic content like music, e-books, movies, and television programs, portals such as iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon make piracy less attractive. So long as content vendors continued to try to tightly shackle the uses of media, following the dictates of Vaidyanathan's Celestial Jukebox idea--and to require would-be buyers to go through the hassle of digging out their credit card and entering their number for every single purchase--then piracy would be a very attractive alternative indeed. It is only by dropping such barriers to access that content vendors have had any success against online piracy.
Textbooks however exist at a specific nexus of cultural, economic, and ethical imperatives that make it likely they will continue to be pirated for some time to come. Attendance at universities and colleges now comes with a hefty price tag and many students may reason that, having paid thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to get an education, that they are entitled to get something for free (Nestel and Walsh 2014). On that count, obtaining a pirated textbook amounts to no small savings for a student: In the West, a book for a basic college course can often run USD$100 to $300, even secondhand, compared to which the alternative of 'free' is quite stark. While many aficionados of particular artists, writers, or musicians might be persuaded by an ethical appeal to support the creation of content they like, it is difficult to imagine many students being similarly moved to economically support the creation of academic textbooks, which they are otherwise obligated to both purchase and read. That college textbooks are generally the product of large, moneyed corporations lends support to their sense that textbook piracy is a victimless crime or perhaps even an act of righteous revenge.
Notes
1 "Pirated," "piracy" and "pirating" for the purposes of this article are terms of art covering a variety of copyright- and/or license-violating practices and technologies. They should be understood herein to encompass both the more-familiar, large-scale forms of peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, dark nets, non-Internet online protocols like Usenet or Tor and the like but also simpler forms of digital copying and sharing, such as a student 'manually' scanning a book and then sharing it with a few friends or classmates using e-mail, cloud storage, or physical media like a USB drive.
2 The price, but not necessarily the value. Many have noted that adjacent-year editions of a textbook are rarely substantively different: 2016's edition of Young's Physics is essentially identical to 2015's edition in terms of the scientific information it contains. More commonly, new editions simply replace practice problems and adjust page numbering so as to render it more difficult for students to buy and use the cheaper, prior-year edition rather than the more expensive current-year one. University instructors could probably save their students a great deal of money if they simply used an edition three or four years old, with little risk of the students missing out on new information.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Erla Heyns, director of the Engineering Library at Cornell University and of his colleagues throughout Cornell University Library. The author also thanks his family for their love and support.
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