The rise of uni­ver­sity text­book piracy: the scourge of the text­book pub­lisher, a bless­ing for students.

All forms of print pub­lish­ing must con­tend with the dig­i­tal tran­si­tion, but col­lege text­book pub­lish­ing has a par­tic­u­larly nasty prob­lem on its hands. Col­lege stu­dents may be the angri­est group of cap­tive cus­tomers to be found anywhere.

Com­pared with music pub­lish­ers, text­book pub­lish­ers have been rel­a­tively pro­tected from piracy by the con­sid­er­able trou­ble entailed in dig­i­tiz­ing a printed text­book. Con­vert­ing the roughly 1,300 pages of Organic Chem­istry into a dig­i­tal file requires much more time than rip­ping a CD.

Time flies, how­ever, if you’re hav­ing a good time plot­ting right­eous revenge, and stu­dents seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks.