The slow but steady growth of e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle as well as the Barnes & Noble Nook pave way for users especially students to save quite a sum from downloading digital textbooks instead of buying the printed copies. But a remarkable shift in purchase behavior may be far from reach.
Currently, readily available torrents of copyrighted materials online are dependent on the popularity of the resource. These equate to blockbuster movies or widely watched television shows. As for digital versions of academic books and journals, the range may still be far too limited.
Charlie Osborne from ZDNet searched for available university-level audio books, e-books and academic journals in torrent indexing sites that are free to download. In his findings, recent publications are unavailable because accordingly such materials take time from purchasing to torrent making, releasing and then seeding. However, he also found thousands of other audio titles and e-books from various categories like medicine, computer engineering, mathematics and childcare.
Journals on the other hand were harder to find. Osborne suggests that this is due to the fact that majority of journals are already in public domain for students in universities and they can easily search for such journals that come free with their membership subscriptions rather than go through torrent lists online.
Sites like Project Gutenberg freely provide a number of books that have expired licenses. But it also provides recent publications. Other hosts like JSTOR provide downloadable journal articles. This service also provides a subscription-based model for other hosted articles. Certain individuals also upload publications as part of their protest against injustice in academic writing, particularly in scientific publications.
Various institutions and societies also make their digital books, audio debates, or journals readily downloadable in their respective sites.
Issues on academic theft according to Osborne are just in the baby phases as of the moment. Though torrents rely on a file’s popularity to survive, it takes only one person in order to maintain a publication’s availability. Therefore, Osborne points out that publishers should take advantage of the moment by developing measures to provide legal alternatives for academic file-sharing while the issues are yet to sprout.
