The Harvard Cooperative ("The Coop," pronounced like the coop in chicken coop) is a venerable institution whose main branch in Harvard Square is the principal retail outlet for textbooks to Harvard students. Generations have bought their texts and other books there. Like many college bookstores the old co-operative was bought out by a modern chain and the Harvard Coop is now a Barnes and Noble College Bookstore. The subsumption by a book retail giant some years ago was only one sign of a change in the book business, however. Now we have the internet which gives the modern cost conscious college student the ability to comparison shop. That is if you can make the comparison. To do that you need to know what price The Coop is charging. If The Coop has anything to say about it, you will also need a pretty good memory:
Taking notes in class may be encouraged, but apparently it can get you kicked out of the Coop.Jarret A. Zafran '09 said he was asked to leave the Coop after writing down the prices of six books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial he hopes to take.
"I'm a junior and every semester I do the same thing. I go and look up the author and the cost and order the ones that are cheaper online and then go back to the Coop to get the rest," Zafran said.
"I'm not a rival bookstore, I?m a student with an I.D.," he added. (The Harvard Crimson, h/t Boingboing)
The Coop's position -- are you ready for this -- is that the price and ISBN [an identifying code for books] information is their "intellectual property." According to The Crimson, Harvard opposed a suggestion that a central database of ISBN for Harvard required course books be established. The newspaper noted the long standing cozy relationship between the university and The Coop. Maybe that was acceptable in days past, before the internet made the real prospect of saving money in text purchases feasible. But given the cost of texts these days (many typically cost well over $100), saving $50 to $100 on text purchases is a real possibility.
For me the story is how a store's prices could be claimed as their intellectual property, just another sign of how the weird notion of "intellectual property" has reached new heights of perversion of common sense.
The next thing you know someone will claim work I did and you paid for is really their property. Oh, wait ...
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Whoaboy, Revere - great idea...gotta find an angle...
I introduce to you now.... UBC.... Universal Book Coverage. Its a new program thought up by Edwards and Hillary to cover America with new school books, at someone else's expense. It is of course the latest in the long line of takeovers by the USgovernment and will result in the thought police collecting any book up that doesnt conform to federal policy. That is no creationism, no intelligent design, no gap theory and especially my favorite... we just ARE.
However, you must instead of carrying a fish on the back of your car now show the symbol for a DNA helix. Stickers are available from the bookstore for only 125 bucks.
Intellectual property? Sounds like there are varying degrees of the interpretation of intellectual.
Sorry Revere, I couldnt resist.
Randy: So why doesn't it bother you that the government is screwing me out of much more money to prosecute a war most Americans think is wrong? No one gets anything for it. I don't get any health care and the Iraqis don't even get clean water. I realize that you didn't mean for your comment to have anything to do with the post -- which is all about your God, The Free Market -- but what do you think about prices being intellectual property? Isn't that a bit much even for you?
O'Leary: Too late. The scientific publishers got there ahead of you. To publish with most of the big guys you have to sign over your copyright. But I do have an angleof my ownl. I am the editor of a journal that lets authors keep their copyright. That angle is a cute one (I know you aren't obtuse, right?)
Revere--I applaud your efforts to let author retain copyright. I am not a majorly frequent author, but when I do, it is in journals owned by the arch-nemesis Elsevier, and I have to sign the rights over. Not given any choice by the meeting organizers. If only I worked for the federal gov'ment. (Oh wait, I work for them through the spring to pay my lawful taxes! Wish that counted.)
VJB: Not sure your field, but both the PLoS and BMC journals allow author to retain copyright and are Open Access in addition. You have to pay a processing charge, but it is usually less than the page charges the big publishers charge in their big journals and you keep copryright and readers read for free (thus increasing your exposure).
Yeah you are right Revere. This schoolbook thing is WAY out on the far end. I can remember baby boys 9th grade year and they had to have the TENNESSEE science book that taught only very, very limited evolution while even the goddamn Catholic school down the street used the same book only the standard edition. And the cost of a special edition is out of this world.
Embry Riddles books were put online years ago, except for English, Social Studies the usual suspects. Online... 15 bucks for the sign up. Print all you want. English-like 80 bucks and like you said... intellectual property so you couldnt get one on Ebay fast enough. Books are as big a racket as vaccines.
What do the profs do if they didnt write it, ask for a comp copy or is it thru the nose like the rest of us?
LOL.
I can speak to that. Through the nose.
You do not want to know what the cost of a graduate student's personal library is. In 1977, when a grad student at the University of Arizona got a lordly stipend of $330 per month for TA work, Peter Henrici's "Applied and Computational Complex Analysis" cost $80 per volume.
An assistant prof gets hit worse. But at least most of them don't have incomes so low that they qualify for food stamps.
Randy: If you teach the course you get desk copy for free. There are some professors (this is rare but I know personally of one example and I think there are others) who personally refund the royalty to students for their books if they use it in their class.
can (random) numbers be copyrighted ?
I had this discussion in internet for years.
Or numbers with some special mathematic properties.
Is there a list somewhere of all copyrighted numbers ?
What's the smallest copyrighted positive integer ?
[Revere]: Not sure your field, but both the PLoS and BMC journals allow author to retain copyright and are Open Access in addition. You have to pay a processing charge, but it is usually less than the page charges the big publishers charge in their big journals and you keep copryright and readers read for free (thus increasing your exposure).]
Revere: For PLoS Medicine the publication fee is US$2750. Authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee. If I had to pay that kind of money to publish I'd go bankrupt pretty quickly. I run a small-for-profit business and we publish 8-10 papers per year. Assuming that all these papers were appropriate for the journal (which they are not) that would mean a charge of around $20,000. Currently, I don't get charged for 90% of the papers i do publish.
First of all, copyright does not apply to facts in and of themselves, only to unique and original creative products. Thus for example, a telephone company can copyright its particular packaging of phone numbers in a directory with certain unique attributes such as local shopping guides, but it cannot copyright the names and telephoone numbers themselves (thus we get all those pesky redundant competing phone books).
The Coop (which shouldn't even be legally allowed to retain that name since it is no longer under a cooperative ownership structure) thus has NO copyright in the ISBN numbers (which in any case are a public database) or in the prices it charges for its books. And if I were going to Harvard I would be looking seriously at raising a lawsuit to obtain nothing more than a declaratory judgement to that effect.
Beyond that, the policy is unenforceable. For example:
A student goes in wearing a Bluetooth headset associated with a cellphone, on which s/he has called a friend who is sitting in a dorm in front of a computer that is onlilne with a search service. The student picks up each textbook, says the name, ISBN number, and price, and then his/her friend looks it up online and reports back "go/no-go."
Then the Coop (B&N) retaliates by declaring that no cellphone usage is allowed in the store, allegedly because the conversations distract other patrons.
OK, now our student does the same with a Blackberry, Razzberry or other text device. And B&N retaliates by saying that no electronic communications devices whatsoever are allowed in the store. Now they're skating on somewhat thinner ice, but let's indulge the assholes for a few more rounds.
Next, our student goes and holds up each book near a window, where another collaborator outside the store uses a pair of binoculars to read off the ISBN number and price over a cellphone headset to the friend at the computer. Anyone want to bet that B&N would attempt to prevent students holding up books near store windows? That would be a hoot, wouldn't it?
Next, our student trains him/herself to have an enhanced digit span memory, with which to memorize the ISBN number and price of one book at a time; and having done so, steps outside to use any available means (cellphone, payphone, text message) to relay that information back to the friend in the dorm, who signals back, "go/no-go." But B&N retaliates this time by saying "no ins & outs" just like a crappy nightclub, thereby preventing the dashing back & forth with the numbers.
But last of all, we return to the simplest of technology: the printed page.
The student takes the course syllabus, enters the book titles in an online search, retrieves the ISBN numbers and prices for the probable editions of each textbook, and then prints out the list of these for each book. Armed with the list of ISBN numbers and lowest prices, s/he then steps into B&N and looks at each book, finds the match on the list, and compares the price.
I would love to see B&N try to justify throwing that student out of the store, or declaring that no competing price lists may be brought in. That would be the maximum hoot. It would rest solely upon the premise that a store has a right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, and that "any reason" includes "comparison shopping." That would so fly in the face of 225 years of free-market tradition that any judge with half a brain would throw it out and give B&N's lawyers a scolding for even attempting it.
The moral of the story is that facts yearn to be free, and all the twisted logic of censorious monopolists isn't enough to prevent the facts getting out, or other facts getting in.
And if they don't like that, then let's try this:
A student stares intently at the ISBN number and price on each book, and closes his/her eyes for a few moments. S/he then informs store personnel that s/he is using nonlocal communication: ESP, to use the old term for it, to relay that information to someone outside. S/he then points to a friend seated a short distance away (outside the store) who is intently scribbling notes on a pad. (Whether or not there is actually any attempt at nonlocal communication is beside the point: and this can be done as an act with equal impact on the store. In any case, based on prior research the best we could hope for is that the "receiver" got more of the digits correct than would occur by chance, but even a p less than .001 result (dammit this blog doesn't take the "less than" sign) won't be enough to be usable in a book search. Nonetheless it would be an intereting research project...) The store manager sees the other student scribbling notes, who then looks up and says to their friend, loudly enough to be clearly heard, "Hey, you stopped transmitting, what's up?"
So what's B&N's position then, eh? "NO *thinking* in our store!"
Let's see B&N try to claim they have a right to stop *that*!
Personally, I say they can go f--- themselves with a cactus.
g510 (if I may use your copyrighted name): LOTMS (laughing to myself silently).
Why don't students just print out the online prices and then bring them to the bookstore! I'd like to see them find fault with that.
George: I'll have more on this tomorrow as The Coop has escalated things by calling the cops. There are many online sources for books and the prices are different and vary from book to book. The service allows a student to see all the online sources at once and really comparison shop. I'll have the link in tomorrow's post along with more background.
So I called a geek in Central Intel and she gave me these things.
http://my.linkbaton.com/isbn/
http://isbntools.com/
http://www.isbn-international.org/en/directory.html
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/isn/041011-1040-e.html
http://www.studentbookworld.com/books/index.php/'GUARDIAN'_MEDIA_DIRECT…
I am told that these are the gateways. After you get the title and the necessary year, well its all over but the shouting for the Coop. We call them thar things Co OPs. As in the coercion poor college students into buy a crap load of books you will never need. I remember English and it required 7 books to be brought to class. Of those 7, 1 was used consistently the other six I can remember cracking once.
And they wonder why so many people cant afford to go to school.
As for those guys who turn the royalties back their students....attaboy!
I've heard Best Buy has in the past resorted to the same tactics by threatening to kick out people writing down prices. Best Buy employees are also known to lie to you about whether a product is in stock if you don't want the protection plan.
I used to work in a Borders in downtown Boston, which wasn't connected with any educational institution. Around the first of the semester we were constantly flooded with people trying to catch a bargain on book prices, and that was when I learned a critical point about the textbook business: it's a complete scam. If someone came in looking to special-order a textbook from us, I always always always hedged on the price. If we were lucky enough to have it in the store database (not often, as Borders mostly doesn't handle textbooks at retail), the price would be different from that in Books In Print, which in turn would be different from the actual price that was charged the customer on pickup. There was no rhyme or reason to it.
Academic publishers can kiss my ass. I liked the idea that Borders at the time put a high priority on being available for the customer (that has changed for the worse since I left) and I didn't like jerking my customers around like that.
g510:
The Coop doesn't even have to enforce a cell ban. The building, like many older buildings, is practically a Faraday cage -- you can't get a cell signal in the Mass Ave building unless you're very close to the windows on the third floor, and forget it in the Brattle/Palmer building. You might be able to hit someone on the street with a high-powered GMRS walkie-talkie though. (But then, there's millions of GMRS units out there and most of them are unlicensed, so maybe they could whack you for operation of unlicensed communications equipment if you couldn't produce an operator license? That's $11K if the FCC gets a conviction, though they don't enforce for the most part.)