[tt] NYT: Digital Domain - First It Was Song Downloads. Now It's Organic Chemistry.

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Digital Domain - First It Was Song Downloads. Now It's Organic Chemistry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/technology/27digi.html

By RANDALL STROSS

AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to
download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org
composed a colorful message for "all publishers" of college
textbooks, warning them that "myself and all other students are
tired of getting" ripped off. (The contributor's message included
many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital
transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty
problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of
captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks
listed at the Pirate Bay, John E. McMurry's "Organic Chemistry." A
new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it's about $150;
used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are
outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by
callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping
themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially
when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up
free.

But many people outside of the students' enclosed world would call
that plain theft.

Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been
relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble
entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly
1,300 pages of "Organic Chemistry" into a digital file requires much
more time than ripping a CD.

Time flies, however, if you're having a good time plotting righteous
revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price
of textbooks. More students are choosing used books over new; sales
of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the
semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and
shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of
revenue -- and the demand for used books goes up all the more.

Used book sales return nothing to publishers and authors. Digital
publishing, however, offers textbook publishers a way to effectively
destroy the secondary market for textbooks: they now can shift the
entire business model away from selling objects toward renting
access to a site with a time-defined subscription, a different thing
entirely.

The transition has already begun, even while publishers continue to
sell print editions. They are pitching ancillary services that
instructors can require students to purchase, just like textbooks,
but which are available only online on a subscription basis. Cengage
Learning, the publisher of Professor McMurry's "Organic Chemistry,"
packages the new book with a two-semester "access card" to a Cengage
site that provides instructors with canned quizzes and students with
interactive tutorials.

Ronald G. Dunn, chief executive of Cengage Learning, says he
believes the printed book is not about to disappear, because it
presents a large amount of material conveniently. Mr. Dunn predicted
that textbook publishers were "headed for a hybrid market: print
will do what it does best, and digital will do what it does best."

Whether students will view online subscriptions as a helpful adjunct
to the printed textbook or as a self-aggrandizing ploy by publishers
remains to be seen.

As textbook publishers try to shift to an online subscription model,
they must also stem the threat posed by the sharing of scanned
copies of their textbooks by students who use online publishing
tools for different purposes. The students who create and give away
digital copies are motivated not by financial self-interest but by
something more powerful: the sweet satisfaction of revenge.

Mr. Dunn says that online piracy is "a significant issue for us."
His company assigns employees to monitor file-sharing sites, and
they find in any given month 200 to 300 Cengage textbook titles
being shared. The company sends notices to the sites, demanding that
the files be removed and threatening legal action.

Textbook Torrents, a site that opened last year and was wholly
dedicated to arranging peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files,
closed without explanation this month. But other sites continue to
rely upon similar technology for disseminating unauthorized copies
of textbooks, facilitating the piece-by-piece movement of copies of
files found on the computers of participants.

The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden, presents a devilishly
fearless challenge to American textbook publishers. It describes
itself as an "anticopyright organization" and offers music, movies,
television shows and software, as well as e-books like textbooks --
not a single item of which, it boasts, has ever been removed at the
request of a copyright owner.

When a copyright holder sends the Pirate Bay a removal request, the
letter is posted on the site with a sarcastic response, like
inquiring where an invoice should be sent for the costs of "Web
publishing and hosting services" that Pirate Bay incurred when it
posted the notice. I corresponded last week with Peter Sunde, a
Pirate Bay founder, asking about evidence of greater interest in
textbook titles. He said his site does not collect statistics about
downloads because of privacy concerns, but generally, he said, the
volume of e-book downloads had increased.

The textbook publishers have abundantly good reasons to promote
e-books. When Cengage sells an e-book version of "Organic Chemistry"
directly to students, for $109.99, it not only cuts out the
middleman but also reduces the supply of used books at the end of
the semester.

THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history
indicates, will be broken sooner or later. But as long as it does
work, digital publishing with a subscription model is a much fairer
basis for the business. Such an arrangement spreads revenue across
multiple semesters, so it isn't the unfortunate few students in the
first semester with a new edition who shoulder the bulk of the
burden.

A one-semester e-book subscription does require a change in
expectations. Students cannot sell their texts at the end of a
course, so buying one can't be viewed as a short-term investment to
be cashed out. But as students show no attachment to textbooks in
any case, the loss of access after semester's end seems likely to go
unlamented.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor
of business at San Jose State University. E-mail:
stross at nytimes.com.