Rampant Piracy Will Be The Kindle DX’s Savior | Hacker News Reader

Rampant Piracy Will Be The Kindle DX’s Savior

techcrunch.com

14 pointsvaksel14 comments

Just find the book you want in PDF form, upload it to your Kindle over USB, and you’ve got a perfectly readable and convenient textbook.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that students are just going to skip the $500 kindle part of this plan.

I don't think so. You've been able to get PDF versions of many books (both textbooks and novels) for a few years. I've never met anyone who actually printed one out or read an entire book from their computer, save for maybe a leaked Harry Potter book.

As a student, I can say that the point isn't always to read the whole book: the kind of textbook you'd want in a PDF form tends to be large reference books which you can search quickly in a PDF reader. But I'm used to working and reading whole books on the screen, and believe it or not there are quite a few legal ones: for example I work with a few art books whose copyright has expired a long time ago, and I read a lot of research papers in PDF.

I've read many entire books on my computer, mostly from Baen's free library.

An alternative business model for the textbook industry (even with rampant piracy):

"... publishers could move to a more sustainable model in which the textbook is priced close to the cost of printing and shipping (say, $20), while all students are charged a reasonable fee (say, $60) for what really matters, which is the content of the textbook, the labs and homework exercises. Other industries already use this model -- think hardware and software, or razors and razor blades."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...

People already copy games (similar price range) which are 5gb+ nowaways. Downloading a couple mbs of pdf is a no brainer.

Going from 80 to 50 is not a new business model, unless I misunderstood what you said.

Games are not in the same price range as textbooks are. With rare exceptions (I'm looking at you, Steel Battalion and Halo 3 Special Edition), games cost $50-$60 dollars.

In comparison, anecdotally, I have yet to have a semester at college where I wasn't "required" (I could have chosen to try and get by without the textbooks, but thats more hassle then I need) to buy 3-4 textbooks that were anywhere from $80-$150, used. Or that much in supplies for an Art class..

This won't be popular but how about; classes choose which textbooks they require, total cost per student is determined and added on to tuition, the university can now distribute copies in digital or paper format. Keeping it all electronic would lower costs all the way around and still get the authors paid.

This is the way I'd like to see things move. You pay tuition, the university handles the licensing and distribution. Of course it would probably raise prices or reduce availability for those outside a school.

My uni offers access to quite a few engineering books through www.books24x7.com, which is somewhat similar to what you suggest. Teachers usually suggest paper books though, so people can bring them to lectures, etc. (about half the teachers forbid using laptops in class).

This sounds similar to the "music tax": you'll pay whatever the publishers want to charge you, they'll give you as little value as they feel like giving you, and the middleman will enforce it. Such a business model sounds like a recipe for stagnation, not innovation.

An alternative business model for the textbook industry is to charge 99cts per book, sell a million and you're done, fuck the publisher, save the authors.

Games is another market already disrupted by iPhone games for 99cts. $50 for a pacman clone is overkill.

Convenience at the minimum price beats piracy all the time.

Empower the authors, give them tools to write and publish ebooks on their own in an online shop, like AppStore.

Make it easy and disruptive, like blogs, just write and publish, and profit!

Thing is publishers actually have a good chance of convincing schools to add textbooks to the tuition.

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