There are already a lot of (especially science and engineering) textbooks and academic journals available scanned to pdf at filesharing sites. You can ahem Chemistry books! (Not that I, as an academic librarian, could ever recommend this.) If this catches on - and I don't see why it won't - we may see the 'digital music revolution' clusterfuck all over again.

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I had a prof like that in undergrad. Had to buy his books. And then we spent the first class period going through and correcting the errors, mostly typos. Folks got frustrated, and he was like "be thankful, it was cheaper to do it this way than to do a 2nd printing". And the book wasn't all that great either. Clearly, editor was sleeping on the job, if there was one at all.

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The idea of most of our authors self-publishing is laughable. And scary.

There is a lot that goes into a textbook and, more importantly, the supplements.

I work on approx. 1 project per year.

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I have a whole pile of "textbooks" that were bound batches of photocopies sold by one of the textbook stores next to the University. Something like 300 pages of photocopies bound into something that kinda looks like a book, and those would sometimes run as much as $50. I'd much rather get that in PDF format on something like a Kindle.

As it is I'm starting to buy as many of my reference books as possible for my current Kindle. I can actually carry it with me when I get on a plane, the bookshelf full of reference books doesn't do me much good when it is stuck in the office.

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As it is I'm starting to buy as many of my reference books as possible for my current Kindle. I can actually carry it with me when I get on a plane, the bookshelf full of reference books doesn't do me much good when it is stuck in the office.

I'm curious what titles you have in pdf! Would be very interested in that too.

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I have a whole pile of "textbooks" that were bound batches of photocopies sold by one of the textbook stores next to the University. Something like 300 pages of photocopies bound into something that kinda looks like a book, and those would sometimes run as much as $50.

yep, we called those "Kinko's packets". I used them extensively my first two years until Basic Books v. Kinko's ruled that it was copyright infringement.

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I'm curious what titles you have in pdf! Would be very interested in that too.

The latest one is the 3rd edition of John Huntington's Book Control Systems for Live Entertainment, it's actually available in a Kindle edition. Beyond that it's mostly manuals that I download and keep in a folder on my hard drive, and now working on getting onto my server so I can get to it anywhere I have a net connection.

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yep, we called those "Kinko's packets". I used them extensively my first two years until Basic Books v. Kinko's ruled that it was copyright infringement.

Then you just had to buy them through the bookstore so they could pay rights and charge you $150.

Still more useful than 90% of textbooks.

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Then you just had to buy them through the bookstore so they could pay rights and charge you $150.

Which I really object to actually. In one of my classes, the faculty member had us pass around her articles and each of us made 25 copies for the class and they we collated after class.

How is this materially different than buying a course packet at Kinko's? yes, I know they were making a profit and had to completely change their business model as a result, but all it did was shift the behavior to the individual student and it was a pain in the ass.

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Wait, you object to the bookstore paying the authors for rights to their articles? I'm pretty sure that's not what you mean. Maybe I was unclear? The cost went up because the university bookstore was actually obtaining (and paying for) rights to reprint. Which is a good thing, painful as it was at the time.

The scenario you describe only differs from Kinko's in being way more inconvenient.

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