Harvard Coop calls cops on students who wrote down textbook ISBNs
The Harvard Coop bookstore had the police remove students who were writing down the ISBNs of textbooks, in defiance of the store's ridiculous position that ISBNs are "property." Of course, the store is private property (albeit property owned by a co-op that is supposed to be serving Harvard students) and they're free to demand that students leave the premises, but busting students whose "crime" is writing down detailed information about which books Harvard students are required to read in order to get their degree is hardly appropriate for a store that nominally serves the students' interests.
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.LinkThe 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 latest
latest episodes
This seems like quite a creative and egregious interpretation of the law. Are they being charged with theft? Should other bookstore browsers be arrested for seeing the information, and then carrying it away in their memories?
If one actually reads the article:
A spokesman for the Cambridge police, James DeFrancesco, said that no crime was committed and no arrests were made.
Might wanna change the post title.....
And yet, the reference claims no one was arrested...
Hey, they got off pretty light in my experience. A buddy and I started a textbook swap type site in college, we got a cease and desist from the state attorney journal for using the school mascots name in our URL.
Thanks for the correx!
I honestly can't get too incensed about this when they're tasering kids for trying to talk.
Incredible! The police reacted rationally... I'm proud of them.
The bookstore, on the other hand, is run by irrational idiots.
It would make more sense to me that the university would publish the ISBNs online. The bookstore is collecting that info from professors when they submit their booklist prior to each semester anyway and every school posts the list of books online somewhere just without the ISBN so you have to go in and look at the books to make sure you're buying the right stuff when you're shopping elsewhere. No doubt it would require a student movement to apply pressure to the right officials but since it is clearly in the interest of the students, it would probably work.
I've never managed a bookstore (or any other store), but I can imagine it would be unnerving if there were people in my store cataloging the inventory. I'd like to think I wouldn't call the police on them though.
I bought a pen-sized USB bar code reader to scan the ISBNs of my book collection which made short work of getting an inventory of a ton of books. These guys need to put together a similar setup with a wearable computer!
I don't understand how they were allowed to stay in the store after the police were called...It is a private business and it seems to me like if the owner wanted them removed, I don't see how they could argue with that. Can't the owner of a private business on private property decide who he/she wants to have in their store?
not looking for an argument, just and explanation.
p.s. don't get me wrong, it is a ridiculous argument to claim that the store owns the rights to the ISBN...
...The Kampus Kops may have acted rationally this time, but they still made a major mistake: they didn't arrest the store manager for filing false arrest charges. Make that idiot take the ride, and this will stop *really* quickly.
It's a fine line between copying information for whatever personal use one might have, and allowing people to use the store to collect information that's potentially for competitive business purposes, and obviously the store reacted in the most idiotic way possible.
I'd also theorize that ISBNs, if anything, are the property of the licensing agency (Bowker's, in the USA), but of course, that's another barrel of monkeys.
The store does have the right to remove them if they're disruptive or interfering in business, as does any store. But I suspect that this has a lot to do with the corporate system through which collegiate textbooks are distributed, which is kind of draconian and monopolistic.
I'd also heard, a few years ago, that Wal-Mart stores would send security after shoppers who were writing down prices, presumably because pricing information could be compared and shown to be unethically low, in order to unfairly compete with other local stores.
It's really hard to be a fascist in Cambridge. The police are just not on your side.
I've seen Cambridge cops buy homeless people lunch.
@9: Owners and managers are allowed to change their mind after the cops explain the legal facts of life to them, and avoid descending into a nightmarish PR situation. The news wasn't clear on this point, but I bet that's what happened.
@10: That would also explain why the manager wasn't arrested: he/she didn't file charges. Simply calling the cops is not a crime, even if no law has been broken.
@icky2000 - Maybe the Harvard kids should be nicer to the MIT kids then? They're notoriously dismissive, or so I've heard.
I really do wish that people could use our language correctly. A "coop" is an enclosure for fowl. Harvard's bookstore is a "co-op", a shortened form of "co-operative". It was originally called the Harvard Co-op Society when it was formed in 1882. The hyphen is the clue that it's pronounced "koe-opp", rather than "koop". This will be on Friday's test.
I'm fairly sure the Coop is still owned by the Cooperative Society, but it's been operated by Barnes and Noble for about ten years now, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is their corporate policy.
@15: Actually, the Harvard Coop is so spelled, and has is pronounced (by locals) as a single syllable, rhyming with "soup". English is messy and spellings can change.
It seems to me handwriting ISBNs is a bit...well, low-tech, error prone, and so 20th century.
Why wouldn't you do something a bit clumbsy, like
1. Getting the syllabus of the class, which usually lists the name of the textbook, the author, and the edition number
2. Using Amazon or some other on-line retailer, capturing the ISBN
or
Use something like this
http://isbntools.com/
or this
http://www.lookupbyisbn.com/
or this
http://isbndb.com/
@18: If the goal is to buy the books online rather than at the campus bookstore, then you need the information weeks in advance. You typically can't get the syllabus until the first day of class, and to get it you'd have to attend every class; that would be a lot more work that what they're actually doing. The issue isn't finding out the isbn given the author, title, and edition; it's making sure what book is even being used in the course. Often books are available in a variety of forms: various editions, one volume or "splits," possibly shrinkwrapped with various goodies (which may be mandatory, optional, or useless, depending on the prof). Also, they're trying to comparison-shop, and they can't do that without seeing what price is actually being charged in the store.
It seems to me like most of the problems about finding specific course books for book distribution is that this is handled by distributors, such as Follett, who sets price standards for both sales and buyback. Most universities operate their own bookstore, and in the area there's an independent bookstore, which will deal in the same books through subscribing through Follett's system.
Obviously these guys were either not considering this or were trying to do something a bit more fair and equitable than paying possibly $100+ for new hardcover textbooks, and risking having to sell them back for less than $5 because of a change in editions.
The Harvard "co-op" is being rational, they are just trying to stay in business. The way you do that these days is by whatever means possible.
Dat's ah nice little website youse got yer self there. Shame if sumpin should ah... happen to it. Capiche?"
Business seeks naturally to capture, contain and control it's market. Technological progress upsets that arrangement and shifts the balance of power. In this case in favor of the consumer though not always.
Did anyone notice the real irony here? The co-op was once little more than a bunch of students pooling their limited resources to save some money. In other words it was a socialist (at least in spirit) bookstore. Now it is owned or licensed or whatever arrangement they have, by a behemoth corporation and it is the students website that now more truly reflects the original student co-operative.
So irony isn't dead after all.
I'm betting they where writing down a whole lot more then ISBN numbers, because ISBN numbers by themselves are useless (unless you have some strange/awesome fetish). The students must have been writing down the Course number which could produce: Course name, Course title, Teacher. and the ISBN which could produce: Book title, Author, Edition. I'm betting they wrote all of it down, not just the ISBN and Course number.
So basically their intention is to compete with the bookstore (competition is good, don't get me wrong) except they believe they shouldn't have to do the legwork of organizing and developing a way to get the information.
They could lobby the school, with enough support and massive effort they could get the records of: course number and relevant books put online every year and not just supplied to the bookstore. This would allow every student to look up what they need simply (of course that would be bad for these punks, since they are most likely trying to make money)
What they are doing seems underhanded to me, but I'm pretty sure the bookstore has no right to guard the information by kicking students out under the normal campus bookstore setup where all the information is prominently displayed for consideration prior to deciding to buy. All of this seems like a bad route to take though (compared to getting the school to make this information free to the public) because the bookstore can modify their practices to be more like the store at my alma matter which took your class schedule and ran into the back to get the appropriate books making it harder to look at the book and decide if you really want/need it (they didn't do this to hurt the students, they did it to help them by making getting books easy for the basket weaving majors (not to be confused with the underwater basket weaving majors, who are obviously superior) who couldn't find the right book to save their life)
This development sounds like it's bad for everyone. Students should demand their school publish the required, optional, suggested books well in advance of courses starting for free (as in speech) and also free (as in beer!)
The tl;dr makes me wonder: Is there a word that means both Libre and Gratis? Free speech -and- Free beer? It would be the ultimate awesomeness.
Well that isn't going to happen now is it Spoon? Because I am sure that everyone turns a nice little profit all around, Harvard, Barnes and Noble and the Cooperative Society. This is about protection. Protecting your business from encroaching technology that allows consumers choice.
Textbook Price-Saving Site Endures
And there you have it. Oh, and they have asked for administration support.
All that CrimsonReading.org does is it allows undergraduate textbook shoppers to view Coop prices alongside those charged by other retailers, such as Half.com and Amazon.com.
"All that CrimsonReading.org does is it allows undergraduate textbook shoppers to view Coop prices alongside those charged by other retailers, such as Half.com and Amazon.com."
That's like saying 'all piratebay does is host torrent files.' While it's essentially true, it wouldn't fly in most countries other than Sweden.
Like it or not, the prices of the coop are their intellectual property and they have a right to protect it under U.S. law.
Rob O, Bowker sells blocks of ISBNs to publishers, who thereafter own them subject to certain conditions, like they can't sell them to other publishers. It's possible to argue over whether Bowker or the publishers "really" own ISBNs, but no one would argue that the Harvard Coop owns them.
Flying Squid (24), I'm not sure that's true. Some of those book prices will have been set by the publishers. In any event, book prices are information the Coop freely offers to the public. What the Coop was objecting to was students using that freely available information for purposes they hadn't anticipated and didn't like.
FWIW, I did exactly the same thing at the B&N owned bookstore adjacent to Emerson College, two T-stops down the road from the Coop.
Well, not ISBN's exactly, but names of books and authors, so I could get a better deal on textbooks online. No one cared. I didn't even think someone would call the cops on something like that.
Here is the URL Flying Squid
http://crimsonreading.org
Go there and see for yourself. Just click on any random course and you get several referrals. The "buy" link takes you to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whatever.
It is nothing like Pirate Bay at all.
Here is one:
Applied Statistics and Probability for Engineers
Half.com Used 63.10
B&N Used 80.82
eCampus New 126.58
I think it's pretty self evident.
@neon
Sure, but the worlds smallest violin doesn't do justice to the inequity faced here as students who want to save a buck, but can't be bother to ask professors which books they will need ahead of time, face off, lazily, against a college that has a system in place so that a book is available at 99% of all moments during the semester (during business hours at least) and is ---hesitant--- to challenge the status quo.
And don't pretend the site doesn't make money because they don't sell direct, they're basically selling links on their site. They make money when anyone buys a book at the linked sites through referrer programs... OH HOW NOBLE.
FlyingSquid@42: "Like it or not, the prices of the coop are their intellectual property and they have a right to protect it under U.S. law."
No, they're not. Read the article -- various legal scholars, including many of Harvard's own preeminent Jonathan Zittrain, have weighed in on this, and it's not true. There's a thin copyright in certain kinds of databases, but it certainly doesn't extend to the prices of the books at the Coop. It just doesn't.
The store didn't call the police on the kids and ask them to arrest them for copyright infringement -- they said that they were trespassing.
Thanks for all the comments. Declaration of interest: I'm a co-founder of Crimson Reading.
Re: comment #28 by spoon: Crimson Reading donates all profits (which come from referral commission) to help build a school in Zambia. We're not making any money from this. Re: comment #22 also by spoon, we are willing to put in the work: we get ISBNs from syllabi where possible, but most syllabi don't publish ISBN, edition or publisher so we need to get the information from The Coop.
Re: comment #23 by neon: Yes, the administration have made clear they will not support our efforts to setup a 'book information system' that would gather ISBNs from faculty and distribute to The Coop, Harvard College Library, Crimson Reading and elsewhere. The relationship between The Coop and Harvard administrators is very cosy.
Re: comment #11 by rob: an ISBN is not protected by copyright law; it's a fact. A collection of ISBNs *can* be protected by copyright law if it the collation of those ISBNs had creative input. In this case, the professors own copyright over the reading list for their course, not The Coop. The Coop does not own the intellectual property. They do have a legal right to evict students from the store, but they cannot claim they own the ISBN numbers.
Its been a fascinating week for us. We're just trying to save students some money on textbooks. We're not profiting from this operation. We are lobbying more professors to provide us with this information next semester. This semester only 20% responded to our requests... in the meantime, the only place we can find the ISBN number, or the edition/publisher, for assigned readings is The Coop.
Re: #25 (Theresa) and #30 (TomH):
I'm not at all arguing that ISBNs are, or should be, considered *proprietary* intellectual property, which would pretty clearly go against Bowker's mission to standardize book cataloging under their system. However, I'm saying that this could fall under such slippery arguments as who owns what abstract piece of data: Bowker's not only sells the ISBN, but they control the system and force changes in how it's run (such as the conversion to ISBN-13 from ISBN-10) and administer access to their own "Books in Print" proprietary catalog service.
Similarly, prices are established by the publisher, not the distributor or the retailer. All of these are points as to why the individual store could never rightfully assert an intellectual claim on these. Withholding any of this data would accomplish two things: asserting an insider approach to retail only within large-corporate sphere, and enabling abusive policies towards customers.
As I suspected, and has been confirmed in later comments, the whole intellectual property argument is just a ruse to deprive their customers of the ability to make informed choices. I'm sure it's no coincidence that the group can't get anything useful from the university on this as I'm sure the bookstore's relationship with them is more than a little "comfortable."
Ultimately I think this is a lot larger than any of the single elements of the story. Anyone who doesn't suspect some sort of conspiracy in textbook publishing, distribution and sales has probably never been to college. I suspect something much like this could've happened at any university--in fact, something much worse, considering the high profile that Harvard has. If this had happened at the university I go to, I strongly suspect they would've been expelled for it. Here's hope that the public attention finally gives Harvard a reason to treat it's students more fairly.
Mdhatter: MIT students are notoriously dismissive of Harvard students, as well. One could imagine, for example, creating a database of courses (easy: there's a course catalog), loading that into a portable tablet PC, and then scanning books at extremely high speed as the tablet PC prompts for the next course. You'd be done in no time, as opposed to lurking for hours.
Note that MIT has a similar cozy arrangement with the Tech Coop, but I'm not aware of any efforts by students there to break this monopoly. So I give the nod to the Harvard students, low tech data collection or not.
AFAIK (and I used to work for an educational publishing house, ironically owned by B&N) the ISBNs are owned by the publishers. They purchase large blocks of numbers for a considerable amount of money. I don't know if textbooks are listed on the bn.com website, but the ISBN for any book they have online is part of the URL. You can also enter ISBNs into their search box.
@Neon - As a college professor who's concerned about exploitative practices in textbook publishing (high prices, shrinkwrap, unnecessarily frequent new editions), I love what you're doing at crimsonreading.org. Have you thought at all about the possibility of doing it nationwide? I would think that you could just scale up the database, and it would probably pay for itself with ad and referral revenue. Right now you're having to hound professors and argue with cops, but I think if something like this got to be more of an accepted and widely known part of the college landscape, it could work fine with just casual participation by students and professors. Today, for example, a student who wants to know the required book for my course a few weeks before the semester starts has to email me and ask. If there was a nationwide website that was widely known, that student could ask the same question, but could also suggest to me that I post the information on the website, or do it himself.
The typical email might be something like this:
Dear Professor Smith,
I see that crimsonreading.org has the 8th edition of Halliday, vol. 1, listed as the required text for Physics 221 last semester. Will that also be the required text for this coming semester? If so, then you might want to enter that information at http: //crimsonreading.org?school=ucla&prof=smith&class=phys221.
Thanks in advance,
John Doe
As a regular reader of Boing Boing, the volume of posts like this is starting to disturb me. Isn't this the same kind of fear mongering that the left decries about the right? When police intervention with the most remote chance of being flagged as 'abuse of power' or 'limiting rights' is raised to a pedestal in Fox News-style outrage aren't we just using the same media tools that we ridicule? Maybe it is the vitriol in the language or the automatically assumed anti-police position that I'm reacting to rather than the fact that Boing Boing is bringing these things to light.
These were not STUDENTS looking up their books for classes, these were employees of a competitor documenting the store's inventory. The fact that they were students is not the key point here and the way this post was written as if Harvard co-ops are calling the police to arrest poor students who are just trying to learn is absurd. What is the co-op to do? Let the competitors gather this data while potentially being in the way of paying customers or who knows what (we don't have the full story here)? Or should the co-op have grabbed large sticks and run these competitors out of their store vigilante-style so blue wouldn't be involved?
Bricology (15), back when I was typesetting the Crimson, everybody called it the Coop.
Spoon (22), do you have a special information source, or are we speculating?
If the latter, I'll speculate that they got the course titles, course numbers, and instructors from the online course catalogue. If they were just copying down ISBNs, I'll further speculate that they'd already collected the titles of the required books, very likely on an earlier trip to the Coop.
They may even have done an online search, gotten all the available ISBNs from Amazon and B&N, and been filling in the problem cases when they were noticed and kicked out of the store.
TomH (30), thank you for the inside scoop.
Okay, that settles it for me. The Coop has an inside line on required texts. It's the only place students can get full information on the books they need to buy. The Coop maintains that it's proprietary information; i.e., they want to maintain their near-monopoly.I am so not impressed.
Oddible (35), I don't see where Fox News comes into it.
The students have a right to know which books they're required to buy for their classes. They aren't required to buy their books from the Coop. Nevertheless, the Coop is their only source of that information.
Is there any reason to require that students come singly and in person to the Coop to get information on their course books for the coming semester? I don't see one. I don't believe the Coop has even tried to offer one. The only reason I can see for the Coop to limit access to that information is to make it as inconvenient as possible for students to buy the same books from other booksellers.
The Coop doesn't have the right to do that. And as long as they're the sole source for information on required texts I can see no grounds for them to claim that that's proprietary information, or to exclude students from the store.
If they don't like non-customers in the aisles of their store, there's an easy fix: they can ask Harvard to publish the list of required texts online, so that students don't have to get that information from the Coop.
Oh, and TomH, since you're going to be dealing with booksellers: It's ISBN, not ISBN number.
@bcrowell:
Don't be so sure. In our store, we have a steady stream of customers all through the semester, up to and including the day of the final for the course.
@noen
Well, on the list of people making a buck from the transaction, don't forget the publishers who by far get the largest cut and hold the greatest responsibility for textbook pricing in the United States. Bookstore margins are actually pretty slim, usually around twenty percent (ours are, at least; the B&N on campus here has a slightly higher markup), i.e. when you're picking up that $190 calculus textbook, your bookstore's probably making about $38 on the deal.
Publishers charge what they feel the market can bear, which is why those companies sell identical (not similar, but identical) texts for about half the price outside the United States.
@oddible
"The Coop has an inside line on required texts. It's the only place students can get full information on the books they need to buy."
Uh, how about the PROFESSOR who ordered the books from the store in the first place? If the responsibility for a student's comparison shopping lies anywhere, it must be there.