Students Found to Rely on Pirated Textbooks to Save Costs
A study conducted by NetNames has revealed an unlikely source for the bulk of ebook piracy: students. The online security company further revealed that the extent of piracy is even more startling, with no less than 76% of digital content meant for academic available to be downloaded free from pirate sites. NetNames searched for 50 specific textbooks across five disciplines – medicine, mathematics, science, engineering, and business – and found 38 to be available from one e-book sharing site completely free.
Experts pegged the high rate of piracy as far as academic ebooks are concerned to the high price tag that these typically cost. Some of the ebooks can be priced as high as £80 – £90, which has forced the students to look for other ways of acquiring them. The typical mindset at work here is that many of the ebooks will be of use to them for a few months to about a year at the most, which prompts them to seek other alternatives so as not to end up drawing too much from their student finance loans.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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A study conducted by NetNames has revealed an unlikely source for the bulk of ebook piracy: students. The online security company further revealed that the extent of piracy is even more startling, with no less than 76% of digital content meant for academic available to be downloaded free from pirate sites. NetNames searched for 50 specific textbooks across five disciplines – medicine, mathematics, science, engineering, and business – and found 38 to be available from one e-book sharing site completely free.
