41 ms·

Agreed, the whole ebook wars missed the point that for fiction books only 10% of the cost of producing a book is the actual printing press, another 10% might be

Agreed, the whole ebook wars missed the point that for fiction books only 10% of the cost of producing a book is the actual printing press, another 10% might be distribution (but given most publishers had to hire new job positions for digital distribution, this didn't really go away it just got a name change). Textbook printing amounts for between 10% and 30% (depending on things like glossy paper, number/size of pictures, etc). However, given that many textbooks come with a CD and often hours of video, it could actually be a very expensive digital distribution. It's very different serving a 1MB file to 10,000 people than serving a 700+MB file to 10,000 people. One of my wife's courses came with 4 discs for administrative assistant course, her college alone had 500 students starting each semester, which means you're looking above 2gig for a textbook per student. So over 1TB per college. Granted you can easily buy that sort of bandwidth, but it's that they might have to buy 1PB of bandwidth for the sum total of a two-week period when school starts. I think publishers would likely rather keep their deal with Fedex for bulk distribution than figure out digital distribution when there's no considerable cost difference in distribution and people are forced to pay.

aw3c2 15y ago
Torrents. Supply a unique key with each book. Only allow one peer with that key in the swarm at the same time. Done.
- cellis 15y ago
  Could you elaborate on this?
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    Example of private torrent trackers: Private torrent trackers work with the user having a unique string and the torrent client's announce to the tracker includes that string. If the tracker knows the string, it will a) give the torrent client information about the swarm so the user can download and b) monitor the user's traffic and update the site's account accordingly. If the tracker does not know the string it will reject the user and not tell him about the swarm. In "meatspace" with non-nerds you would probably supply the user with a preconfigured torrent client which has the ID hardcoded in it (eg give the user an URL to download the client from). Add some nice social gibberish about how nice it would be to share with others for some days/weeks, celebrate each megabyte the user uploads and hope for the best.
    - electromagnetic 15y ago
      This is true, although I highly doubt companies would take this on for the perceived fear it could be hacked, but then again this is likely the fear of going electronic in the first place (although anyone really interested in pirating a 500 page textbook would simply buy a double-sided fax-style scanner - where it rolls the page through - and simply cut off the spine of the book). A cunning use of a private tracker would be to embed a reader into the client so that non-nerds are more likely to keep opening the client to use their textbooks and simply set the seed rate low at 10kb/s so it doesn't kill peoples bandwidth and get noticed. If you make it readable in part and download in priority (first pages first, obviously), you might only have to seed >0.1% of the estimated bandwidth usage to get everyone with full books. Actually this would be an amazing way to distribute a game too. If the client is built into the game launcher, simply have the client only download the core and the mandatory tutorial. If someone goes down a certain quest path you prioritize the later portions of the quest before continuing the download of the other quests. You could also prioritize associated quests and follow on quests because you know people will complete them.
- ColdAsIce 15y ago
  Why would you base a business on artificial scarcity? Torrents, and the distribution is solved.
- elemeno 15y ago
  Or far simpler - Akamai Torrents are great, but most people don't know what they are and won't want to download a torrent client just to get the supplementary materials for a textbook. Using Akamai, or other similar services, means they'll just have to stick their code in and click a link.
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    That would cost a lot though. With torrents you have the chance to save some bucks (at least on bandwidth costs, the deployment/coding might be much more expensive).

aw3c2 15y ago

Torrents. Supply a unique key with each book. Only allow one peer with that key in the swarm at the same time. Done.

cellis 15y ago
Could you elaborate on this?
- aw3c2 15y ago
  Example of private torrent trackers: Private torrent trackers work with the user having a unique string and the torrent client's announce to the tracker includes that string. If the tracker knows the string, it will a) give the torrent client information about the swarm so the user can download and b) monitor the user's traffic and update the site's account accordingly. If the tracker does not know the string it will reject the user and not tell him about the swarm. In "meatspace" with non-nerds you would probably supply the user with a preconfigured torrent client which has the ID hardcoded in it (eg give the user an URL to download the client from). Add some nice social gibberish about how nice it would be to share with others for some days/weeks, celebrate each megabyte the user uploads and hope for the best.
  - electromagnetic 15y ago
    This is true, although I highly doubt companies would take this on for the perceived fear it could be hacked, but then again this is likely the fear of going electronic in the first place (although anyone really interested in pirating a 500 page textbook would simply buy a double-sided fax-style scanner - where it rolls the page through - and simply cut off the spine of the book). A cunning use of a private tracker would be to embed a reader into the client so that non-nerds are more likely to keep opening the client to use their textbooks and simply set the seed rate low at 10kb/s so it doesn't kill peoples bandwidth and get noticed. If you make it readable in part and download in priority (first pages first, obviously), you might only have to seed >0.1% of the estimated bandwidth usage to get everyone with full books. Actually this would be an amazing way to distribute a game too. If the client is built into the game launcher, simply have the client only download the core and the mandatory tutorial. If someone goes down a certain quest path you prioritize the later portions of the quest before continuing the download of the other quests. You could also prioritize associated quests and follow on quests because you know people will complete them.
ColdAsIce 15y ago
Why would you base a business on artificial scarcity? Torrents, and the distribution is solved.
elemeno 15y ago
Or far simpler - Akamai Torrents are great, but most people don't know what they are and won't want to download a torrent client just to get the supplementary materials for a textbook. Using Akamai, or other similar services, means they'll just have to stick their code in and click a link.
- aw3c2 15y ago
  That would cost a lot though. With torrents you have the chance to save some bucks (at least on bandwidth costs, the deployment/coding might be much more expensive).