I thought the saga of The Harvard Coop would be over once the inanity of its claim that the ISBN numbers of books used in Harvard courses were their intellectual property. The ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a 13 digit number and barcode used by publishers to identify books uniquely. Harvard students were going to the text book section of the Coop (the original name of the Harvard Cooperative, later bought by the Barnes and Noble College Division), copying down the ISBN numbers and then making them available online via CrimsonReading.org, a service that automates comparison shopping. I'll tell you more about CrimsonReading.org shortly, but here's is the latest stupidity. Not satisfied with the bad publicity of asking a student to leave for copying down information on six books he needed for a course, they have now compounded it by calling the cops:
The Harvard Coop called police yesterday after three undergraduates collecting information for a student-run textbook-shopping Web site refused to leave the bookstore. The two Cambridge police officers who arrived allowed the students to continue copying down book identification numbers, which they did for two and a half hours before leaving on their own terms.The Cambridge Police Department said its officers removed three or four males from the Coop's third floor, where textbooks are sold, at a Coop official's request after receiving a call from the store at 4:34 p.m. But a Crimson reporter and photographer present did not see anyone removed, and the three students collecting data for the Crimson Reading Web site also said they did not witness the police escorting anyone from the floor.
The tense afternoon at the venerable 125-year-old bookstore comes two days after the Coop reaffirmed a policy discouraging students from copying down book identification numbers. Students are able to go online and use those numbers, known as ISBNs, to find better deals for textbooks.
The year-old, student-run crimsonreading.org site allows Harvard students to find cheap textbooks at Internet booksellers by clicking on the courses they are taking. The Coop has argued that it owns intellectual property rights to the identification numbers for the books it stocks, which are organized by course on the third floor. Crimson Reading Director John T. Staff V '10 insists the information is in the public domain.
Staff was at the Coop yesterday from about 4:30 until 7 p.m. Coop officials repeatedly asked Staff, Adam Goldenberg '08, and Jarret A. Zafran '09 to leave the floor, but the students refused.
A spokesman for the Cambridge police, James DeFrancesco, said that no crime was committed and no arrests were made.
Two Cambridge police officers arrived at the scene at about 5:30 p.m. They departed after talking to Coop officials, and Staff was able to continue copying down ISBNs.
Coop President Jerry P. Murphy '73 did not return repeated requests for comment last night. (The Harvard Crimson via Boingboing)
Good for the Cambridge Police Department. They shouldn't be forcing students to leave a public space when no law was being broken and there was no interference with the operation of the business or the rights, comfort or well-being of any other patron or employee. And they didn't.
This retail bookstore, owned by a book retail giant, is making itself a laughingstock and affording oodles of free publicity for this service. I hope students in other places follow suit. That's what capitalism is all about, right? The Market? Competition? Innovative retailing and marketing? Maybe The Coop thinks this is unfair. Tough. ISBNs aren't intellectual property. Period. B&N and other big chains have put thousands of small, independent booksellers out of business because they could sell books cheaper and maintain a bigger inventory. Now it's their turn to become the buggy whip maker in an Automobile Age.
Take a look at the CrimsonReading.org site. It is a very nice referral site that facilitates comparison shopping (pick some courses and books at random and take a look at the range of prices; some vary by almost an order of magnitude). The service gets a 6% referral fee (which doesn't come out of your pocket but the booksellers). A portion goes to the Harvard Undergraduate Council and the rest goes to this charity:
A portion of the profits are invested in supporting undergraduate life by the Undergraduate Council, and the rest is donated to a charity called Living Compassion to help build a school in Zambia. Crimson Reading has sold textbooks worth about $100,000 in the past 12 months and raised $5500 for Kantolomba, an impoverished community on the outskirts of Ndola, Zambia's second largest city.
Houses in Kantolomba range from cardboard walls with plastic roofs to mud walls with tin roofs. There is no running water or electricity, and sewage flows through the dirt streets. (CrimsonReading.org)
You don't have to be a Harvard student to use the service, although of course you have to want a book used in a Harvard course. If it's good enough for Harvard, though, it's probably good enough for you.
Wait a minute. I can't believe I just said that. Nevermind.
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I remember when B&N bought out the bookstore of the college I attended. Suddenly the prices of books went through the roof.
And there's one more unique identifier on the books, the UPC code. Just buy a cheap bar code scanner and scan away.
I'm sure there's a database SOMEWHERE that ties ISBN to UPC for those books.
Yes, the same thing happened when B&N took over the bookstore at the university where I used to work.
Might I suggest that sympathetic faculty could make life even easier for Crimson Reading by including the ISBNs in the reading lists for their courses?
Does B&N own the bookstore or does the Coop lease out operations to them?
I'm not agreeing with their actions (and their IP argument is dishonest and dumb) but as private property the Coop does have the right to kick people out of its store. If, after being asked, a customer refuses to leave they can be charged with trespassing.
For the record the use of police to intimidate someone is a crime in itself but you have to sue to get your rights.
Also, the Library of Congress lists books by ISBN numbers are they saying that they have the corner on those numbers at the Coop? I would have thought that someone from the law school would have called. You know a quick call to let them know that they are on a very slippery slope and about to take a trip down it, an expensive one at that.
If they were copying stuff out of the book, is the knowledge in them "Intellectual Property" too?
Give 'em Hell Revere. This is one of those areas where you and I agree wholeheartedly and its flamingly apparent what the game is and that is to rip both students, GA's and Profs off. And just because they are there in a closed marketplace. Anyone want to file against them for antitrust activity?
The Coop is going to lose this because they really have no argument. The legal experts that have been consulted seem to agree that an ISBN number is not intellectual property. As for having the right to exclude people from a public space, I don't think they can do it arbitrarily. Certainly the Cambridge Police didn't feel there were any grounds to do so. The college bookstore is open to the public -- especially but not limited to students -- so I don't think they can limit entrance without sufficient reason (e.g., if membership were required or they were hosting a private event.
The fact is The Coop is being hurt by the student internet based service and they are fighting back in a way they can't make work. Maybe it's a good thing and maybe it's a bad thing but either way it's a fact of the modern book business. Get used to it.
A similar thing happened to me while I was a student at the University of Washington. I was writing down the ISBNs for my course books at the University Bookstore. I was asked to leave (luckily I had finished getting all the numbers) once store personnel spotted me. I started to leave, but then decided on asking a question. Specifically, I had asked "Why does the University buy back our textbooks for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and charge ~70% of retail price for those same books?" The staff member mumbled something and asked me to leave again. Hell, they even stopped listing the ISBNs from their online site (at least for the textbooks). I find it pretty underhanded, especially for an institution that purports to benefit students.
Perhaps it depends on the individual Barnes and Noble, because at Temple University, nobody has ever stopped me from copying ISBNs. Heck, my friend and I went in before this semester to get some copied down.
Taylor: That "buy at 5%, sell at 75%" scam has been going on for years. I ran into at at the U. of Utah 25 years ago. Still makes me mad to think of the money they made off me. The last time they called requesting a donation, I asked to be put on their "do not call" list. If they ever call again, I'll tell them where they can get their donation!
Sorry if I'm being dense, but could someone help clear this up for me? Why would you need to go to a bookstore to get ISBN numbers? Those numbers can be found easily by Googling the book title or by searching it on Amazon, which is what I do to make price comparisons for my course books. I know this is only tangential to the point of this post, but if someone would be so kind...
I'm not going to rehash my post in the older thread, but essentially the textbook business is a scam -- the prices are high to begin with, and no one knows exactly what it is until it's on the shelf.
Funny thing... I'm wearing a pair of sweatpants I bought at the Coop just a couple of weeks ago (emergency purchase -- I have never had any affiliation with Harvard except for a college app I mailed in high school). I'm not sure what to think.
Well, there was all the fooferah over the weekend about that MIT student who got arrested for wearing an LED-bearing sweatshirt and a handful of play-doh... the pants-pissers wailing about how "NineElevenChangedEverything and whaddif she had been another Richard Reid!!!1!" were a marvel to behold... perhaps Harvard was simply jealous of all the attention, however negative (/snark).
"Another Richard Reid"
Do they mean another loser who failed to do any harm at all, and who was spotted and taken down by the other members of the public, and not by any security personnel or new spying law? Why, that would be just terrible!
where is a list of the best online free ebooks ?
is there a future for non-free books ?
A public institution should pay the authors from tax-money.
How else could it work in the long run with more
and more people having internet access ?
Ahh, yes, and why would we need Universities
like Harvard anyway, when we have internet ?
Dear Anon
You need Harvard to create the information that goes into the books in the first place. That's why.
Like steve, I'm confused as to why the students were in the bookstore in the first place. Seems much easier to just find the ISBNs on the net - or to ask the tutors of the course you're taking! In Sweden it's been my experience that university staff's always been very cooperative in helping students ripping off bookshops...
For those asking why the students would need to go to the bookstore to get the numbers, my guess is that the instructor's communicate to the bookstore what texts are required for a given course. A trip to the bookstore is a lot more convenient than trying to catch all the professors and ask them what textbooks they are planning to use. When I was a college student, I typically found out what books I needed before each semester by going to the bookstore and checking the shelf.
The info the student's are gathering is not really which ISBN numbers go with which books. The info they are "stealing" is which books are being used for which course. Pretty bold of the bookstore to try to claim that as intellectual property!
ISBNs can also indicate different editions of a book. "New," "Revised," and "Updated! Now with DVD!" are all ways to churn more cash out of a class text. I just purchased a mammoth Art History book from an Amazon seller, trying to save some dough on my kid's books for this semester. It's two years old, but a newer edition is now being used in the class.
It's especially crummy when a professor requires his own book be used for a class that is offered year after year. Just make enough changes to alter the page numbers, add or subtract some text, and you have a New Edition. All the old editions become worthless for resale and students get to buy a brandy-new edition that will be obsolete by next year.
Authors certainly have the right to be compensated for their labors, but it's kind of unseemly that they can use their students (who are already paying for the course itself) as captive consumers.
The Harvard Crimson link is broken.
{pardon if this is a double-post .. the first time errored on me....}
Nat,
I suspect institutions like Harvard are going to go down the road of the RIAA and MPAA soon. MIT's OpenCourseware, along with several other universities and colleges (check out iTunes U) are changing learning slowly but surely. And yes, I do know the difference between "google knowledge" and "real knowledge", but the quality of free courses and textbooks is going up exponentially. I think it is going to be easier and easier for "lifelong learners" to quench their thirst.
Anon,
"the best" is hard to qualify. You have to do some work, read some, and critically examine them.... but, to start off with:
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/
(Also, go to their "links" section for MANY more lists
I have approximately 30GB of free .PDF and .HTML books. Will I ever read them all? Probably not, but I'm saving them for my kids, and their kids, etc....
Blake: Thanks. Fixed.
The textbook business is even more of an enormous rip off in the k-12 public schools, and the rip-ee is the taxpayer. Billions of dollars of the public school budget each year are spent on new textbooks whether they are really needed or not. History doesn't change, nor math, but every year the textbooks are updated regardless. Latest scam to ensure this continues is textbook revisions to meet the "standards" set by states and federal government under the "no child left behind" mandate. Every year some overpaid committee members revise the standards, and thus every year the textbook publishers grin and rub their hands together in anticipation of more sales as they revise their textbooks accordingly. By the time the new textbooks are reviewed, bought and delivered by a school, guess what? They've changed the standards again so the textbooks are out of date.
I'm not against good, well written and developed textbooks appropriate for today's learners, but a lot of the ones being replaced are excellent and don't really need improvement. Education would be benefited more by spending those billions for more teachers, better teacher education and support, smaller class sizes, better classroom equipment and technology, laptop computers for every student, and meaningful, relevant field trips.
This explains why the folks at Swarthmore were so proud to proclaim that they have a college owned campus bookstore during Freshman orientation. A must-see place if you are ever on campus, it is located in the basement of a gothic building that looks like a church. Bookstore as church should appeal to Revere:)
maryinhawaii: Your comment made me smile, because in twelve years of public education, I remember mostly well-used, ugly, heavy, and mediocre (if not bad) textbooks.
Particularly in history, and those were actually the ones that needed updating most, since they focused almost exclusively on the doings of rich, white Christian males. With the occasional tokenistic sidebar about a woman or person of color, never bothering to talk about how the rich, white, Christian males oppressed them. And of course rarely incorporating women or people of color into the general narrative, unless it was absolutely unavoidable, because that would have implied that we/they were. Y'know. There. And doing stuff. That mattered.
And my impression (pre-NCLB, of course) was that textbook contents changed with glacial slowness, and mostly to accomodate the big markets like Texas.
While we're on the subject of textbooks, EF readers might like to know that Pearson Education, upon request, engineers and distributes biology textbooks which have the chapters on evolution removed.... even to colleges -- in Texas. Health texts have any references to homosexuality removed, upon request. But sometimes reference to the "gay chapter" is left in the table of contents by the (gay) PE staff given the job to do the cutting :) Hmmm.
suzyf921:
Didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me that much, especially the exclusion of Teh Gay. Our eighth grade health curriculum included a series of videos on various human sexuality/puberty subjects. I remember us all tittering at the one about masturbation. ("It's ok to masturbate, it's ok not to masturbate," according to the kindly therapist lady.)
Forward thinking stuff, right? Well, the video on homosexuality (called, IIRC, "Choices") basically said "Some people think it's ok to be gay, some people think it's not. Ask your parents."
Or so I heard. The substitute health teacher, who took over the class to its great detriment when ours went out with a serious illness, wouldn't show us that one.
This was the early 1990s, in Massachusetts.
Those numbers can be found easily by Googling the book title or by searching it on Amazon, which is what I do to make price comparisons for my course books. I know this is only tangential to the point of this post, but if someone would be so kind...