Textbook torrents

Στο Interesting People τρέχει ένα thread σχετικά με ένα site το οποίο προσπαθεί να διανείμει textbooks μέσω torrent. Από τα πιο ενδιαφέροντα σχόλια μέχρι στιγμής:

“As a long-time editor of two journals that covered (and in the case of IPJ continues to cover) networking topics, could I refer your readers to a couple of sources for textbook alternatives:

1. The ConneXions archive:

http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/Connexions/index.html

Many of these articles are in fact BOOK EXTRACTS taken from major networking text at the time (1987 – 1996)

2. The Internet Protocol Journal (1998 – )

http://www.cisco.com/ipj

Continues to cover current and emerging networking technologies. Some of the articles in IPJ are also taken from networking textbooks.” (ref)

Ο φοιτητής που ξεκίνησε το δίκτυο θεωρεί την κίνησή του ως δείγμα πολιτικής ανυπακοής, για να εισπράξει την απάντηση πως:

“The undergraduate who is running this site clearly needs to study the basis for civil disobedience more carefully. First, civil disobedience is not committed anonymously, but publicly and with full expectation of suffering the penalties. Second, its purpose is to protest injustice, not prices.” (ref)

και αυτό:

“I a bit surprised that IP readers have not said too much about some of the excellent sources of online texts out there. From excellent CS books such as “How to Design Programs” or “How to Think like a Computer Scientist” (Java/C++/Python versions), to wikibooks, www.freetechbooks.com, www.techbooksforfree.com, http://freecomputerbooks.com, there’s a ton of stuff out there that could be used relatively easily. Not just in computer science – the National Library of Medicine, for example, has full text of several classic biology texts.” (ref)

Υπολογίζεται πως υπάρχουν περίπου 64000 χρήστες του δικτύου.

Update: Γράφει ο Tim O’Reilly: “And printing cost, as the original poster points out, is less than 20% of the cost. There *might* be some savings there, but there’s actually a lot of digital infrastructure required that imposes costs that weren’t present in old school publishing.”