P2P textbooks

With $100 textbooks now the norm, using Bittorrent to distribute pirated copies shouldn't surprise me in the least.

Somehow, I can't manage to feel too much outrage on the part of the authors. I've worked with folks writing textbooks before, and unless you're a huge name that's on one of the standard works for Bio101, you aren't going to make much given the enormous effort it takes to write one of these beasts. The publishers are the ones pushing to rev the book every year so that they can kill the used textbook market, but this has reached the point where everybody in higher ed is basically sick of it.

This is where a decent e-book reader and a few academics could really clean up. Get one or two of the "big" names in chem or biology like Zumdahl or Carey to decide to publish a direct-to-students version of the text for $20-25, half to the author and I suspect people would ditch paper in a heartbeat. The authors would probably end up clearing more as well in the end. However, this is going to need an ebook reader that can do a decent index and high-quality images, unlike the current generation such as the Kindle. Amazon seems to be at least somewhat aware of the demand here, so we can always hope...