Textbook Torrents Offers Free Textbook Downloads

From ArsTechnica we learn about a great site called Textbook Torrents which comes with an impressive offering of almost 6,000 various college textbooks you can download (PDF format).

It seems that this is one of the sites The Chronicle of Higher Education lists in a report as very useful. The site proposes some rules as to help creating a large archive and have as many contributors as beneficiaries that would make things circulate (just as any torrent site): it urges users who've set aside some money thanks to the chance to download material to return the “favor” by buying or at least using a scanner: "Scan as many of your other textbooks as you can, and put them up here for others to benefit from." (…)"There aren't very many scanned texts out there, so let's change that." Any passive downloader could become an active supplier by uploading a text (after having bought and scanned one) to this TT's collection.

The site provides a wide area of textbooks ranging from Fine Arts, Literature, Philosophy, Photography and Medicine to Political Science, Business, Economics or Computer Engineering (believe me, you’ve got plenty to choose from).

Moreover, Textbook Torrents includes a forum section where any user can ask for some particular book, class or coursework.

Recently, the site was targeted by Pearson Education (a major textbook publisher) and asked to take out some 78 torrents linking to books this publisher owns the copyrights. Still, there’s a big difference between book publishers and the RIAA: while the latter are pursuing entire sites or individual file-sharers or site operators, publishers are only targeting individual torrents.