The Harvard Crimson ran a story last week about a student who was asked to leave the premises for writing down the prices of six textbooks at the Coop, Harvard’s bookstore of record. The bookstore’s president says that there’s no official policy against students writing down information, but “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.” But what’s more surprising, he tells the Crimson that the textbooks’ ISBNs—which can be used to look up the same books online—are “the Coop’s intellectual property.”
The Crimson speculates that the Coop may be reacting this way because of Crimsonreading.org, an online database that lets students search for the lowest prices by using ISBN. Harvard’s Undergraduate Council President says he’s spoken with an intellectual property lawyer and confirms that the ISBN-ownership claim is hogwash.
We understand taking severe measures to protect your business against cost-cutting competitors—especially when they have a business model that potentially gives them the upper hand against your traditional brick-and-mortar establishment. But we think it’s pretty hilarious to invent copyright law. And we wonder, do they own the ISBNs of all books, or just the ones in their inventory? Does the publisher have any ISBN ownership rights? Maybe we should create some sort of international, standardized book numbering system so we can replace this proprietary one.
Anyway, so yeah, don’t use ISBNs without writing to the Coop first and asking for permission.
“Coop Discourages Notetaking in Bookstore” [The Harvard Crimson, submitted by Joe—thanks, Joe!)
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@Rectilinear Propagation: Yeah, I realized the shortsightedness of my comments to some. I personally can use that technique without deviation because CUNY Hunter professors generally tend to use regular version textbooks (or occasionally, the Hunter bookstore does have a “custom” version available, but those are near indistinguishable from the regular versions aside from the different cover art). Okay whatever…
Anyway, in general, it’s about high time that textbook publishers stop going out of their way to arserape the students on overpriced textbooks. Either that, or they raise all prices on books uniformly, then maybe they won’t be having to hear about sour feelings (for the same reason anyway).
For textbooks, the Coop is the main game in town–as are the bkstores on most campuses. Lots of profs of English and other courses with trade-based reading lists did, however, connect Wordsworth’s and the Harvard Bookstore and encourage their students to go to the real independents.
Oh, and for the record… I worked at the Coop in the early 90s, and the management was evil.
@IphtashuFitz:
Maybe something like this?
[www.symbol.com]
Gotta love that Harvard edumacation…no wonder the ‘leaders’ they produce are always wrong.
This is why I loved it when professors used pdfs on their websites and jstor whenever possible. I enjoy reading hardcopies of texts, but not enough to buy thousands of dollars worth of textbooks and article compilations.
For everything else, there’s campusi. All I need is the author and title, you can keep your damned isbn.
@FLConsumer: The department chair sidestepped the issue saying professors are free to choose whatever materials they find appropriate to teach the course. I’ve seen it happen far too often in my courses. $200+ for a chemistry text is a sham….
The question is, who is setting the prices? For the $200 textbook, it’s the publishers doing it, and the department can’t do a thing about it except choose another textbook (a nontrivial exercise). In the case of the $75 course packet, however, someone is setting that price: is it the professor, the department, the college, the bookstore? How are they justifying the cost? Have they broken the cost down into its components? Is someone making a profit? etc.
These are rhetorical questions of course. And I’m sorry to harp on this one specific example, but since it is clearly a local matter, it is easier to fix. $75 for lecturer’s notes without copyright issues are NOT “business as usual”, and the people responsible should be called on it, loudly.
But what specifically do they mean by saying that an ISBN is their
intellectual property? IP includes patents, copyrights, trademarks,
etc. Under which of those categories do they think this falls? Unless
the store wrote the books themselves, they don’t own any IP rights to
them.
As far as it being the “book lists” that they want to call IP, that
sounds like a bunch of poo. I work for an IP law firm and don’t see how
they would prove that there was anything IP-related about a list of
books. The only thing I can possibly think of is trade secrets, but
even then it would be quite a stretch.
@lihtox: Considering the Uni prof wrote the book and similar textbooks sell for $145, I’d still blame the prof/department on it. The department COULD choose a different book. As an aside, it was a terribly written book. I ended up buying a different text and adapting it to the class. Organic chemistry is organic chemistry, at least for the basics.
Not sure who set the price on the course packets, but it’s one of the biggest rackets on campus. The bookstore wouldn’t buy them back either, but fortunately you could just put up a sign near the science buildings advertising your copy and you could easily get $50 for it.
State law in Virginia requires colleges to publish the ISBN numbers of all required texts on their websites at the same time the book lists are sent to the university bookstores, removing the middleman and the artificial monopoly that college bookstores have.
@BrianH: I was making plans to start engineering school soon, since my fiance’s job looked pretty stable, and then he found out his position is being “downsized” this week. So much for that. I’m just sick about it.
I can’t believe that the math and science required to do engineering has changed that much in twenty years, however. If you seriously have your old textbooks, and think a smart girl could get started on her own with them, please let me know if we can work something out. My user name at hotmail will do the trick.
@spryte:
The only IP basis they could claim is that the ISBN numbers are a trade secret.
I have had the pleasure of returning to school and was shocked to find what these people expect students to pay for textbooks. Fortunately, one of my savvy classmates clued me into doing exactly what has been recommended above; going to the store, taking a shot of the ISBN of the book and getting it online. She also recommended not selling used books back to the thieves at the college bookstores, but selling the as a merchant on Amazon.
She was right; a tax book that I bought for $180 fetched $150 on Amazon, where the bookstore was offering a paltry $60 for it.
Sometimes old-fart “non-traditional students” can learn from those who are half their age.
Did anyone happen to check out the title of the ISBN in the photo?
“The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience”
If intentional, great job Consumerist!
If not, how wonderfully ironic.
I thought they belonged to Al Gore!
If the bookstore really thinks they “own” ISBNs, they sure are behind on their lawsuits!
If I were these guys, [www.books-by-isbn.com] I’d be shaking in my boots by now!!!
@dsolimini: I was so excited to read your comment, since I’m going back to school next fall.
Until I remembered that the college is in D.C., not Virginia. Drat!
Anyway, the funny thing is that sometimes when selling books online, if I don’t have time or a piece of paper, when I take a picture of the book, I snap the barcode too. That would be easy to do with a good enough camera phone at the bookstore (mind certainly isn’t good enough, but my sister’s would be).
Or just use the notepad feature on your phone and pretend your texting.
I know I graduated college five years ago, but I learned early on to hit the bookstore, write down the IBSN and then hit the internet. Sometimes I bought stuff at the bookstore because it was cheaper used. Once or twice, the bookstore actually didn’t have enough copies of a book to cover all the students and I ended up being one of the rare few that got it. Actually, there was one class where I was one of the only students with the book because I ordered it on half.com and it had gone out of print during the summer and the teacher didn’t realize.
Which is when I learned that most textbooks are available in the library. That particular teacher always put her textbooks on a hold where you could only check them out for a few hours at a time. You never needed to buy anything for her classes.
I have a feeling grad school won’t be so easy.
If you want to get the ISBNs of the books used in your university, file a freedom of information act request with the university. They will generally honor it and should be able to provide it in an electronic format (although it will generally be a mainframe dump and may require some cleanup)
BTW, The Harvard Coop is actually owned and operated by Barnes & Noble, and they take the same stance with regards to copying ISBN. In addition, they have called the police to escort people out of the store taking photos with camera phone on the same “intellectual property” grounds (their displays, they claim).
And, just this past summer, airport security was called in by a Border’s employee because a German tourist was taking pictures of books on display as well. It’s a nutty world out there.
I’ve got an idea – let’s all write the bookstore and ask them for their permission to use the ISBN of a book in their store to search half.com. I’m gonna do it now, just to see their reaction.
The bookstore’s president says that there’s no official policy against students writing down information, but “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.”
Soooo, Harvard is against information?