As a recent college graduate I look back now astonished at how many thousands of dollars I spent buying books over the four-years I was at school. It didn’t matter if the books were new or used, either way you had to fork out an arm and a leg for materials that hardly even got used.
One site is looking to get around that by utilizing the BitTorrent network as a means to share downloads of thousands of textbooks. The site, called Textbook Torrents, requires that you register for free before gaining access to their vast database containing torrents to nearly 6,000 textbooks. After that you can browse, search, and download the textbook torrents as you please.
I was actually surprised to find that several of the textbooks that I used in college, including solution manuals, were available for download. As you can imagine none of this is legal, but that won’t stop people from using the service… especially those struggling college students wondering how they’re going to make ends meet.
P.S. As you might have noticed from the URL above the site is currently only accessible via the IP address, but the domain should be up and working soon.
Textbook Torrents [via TorrentFreak]
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Let’s hope it continues to stay up!
Oh man I would have loved this back in the day.
UBS and CBS got way too much of my money.
No kidding, and I’m sure a site like this will spread like wildfire via word of mouth on campus. I have a feeling this site will do very well for itself.
Isn’t this illegal? Just as downloading music and movies is illegal?
I could understand that novels such as Frankenstein and others in the open domain would be allowed to be sold like this, but wouldn’t this be copyright infringement?
Yes, very much so. But copyright doesn’t mean anything to the new generations of today. I hear it time and again: “I just don’t care”.
this was on the boing boing site, seemed appropriate.
what have you stole?
[hyperorg.com]
taf
Does this only have American Textbooks in or are there UK ones too?
Of course it is, and I mentioned that in the article as well. As Michael pointed out that sort of thing doesn’t stop people from downloading music and movies just because it’s illegal. So it surely won’t stop these people.
Hilarious! I suppose I should return my extra napkins from Taco Bell, too.
I’d think that it would be good for either, but probably at this time it’s probably mostly U.S.
The site has got some quality torrents. But what an ugly site design. yuck