When you ask a student if they’ve ever pirated a textbook, you’ll probably get some reluctant responses. Some may deny it, while others would avoid the question entirely. “What are you a cop,” they’d say. These aren’t unreasonable responses considering the act of pirating textbooks is illegal. However, Haley Dittbrenner ’25 and Rob Sieczkiewicz, Director of the Blough-Weis Library, took the chance on asking both Susquehanna students and faculty their thoughts on textbook piracy all in the name of educational research.
Our story actually begins in November 2022.
“So, our project really began before we even knew it in November of 2022. Because that is when Z-Library was first shut down,” explained Dittbrenner.
For those who don’t know, Z-Library is a well-known shadow library that provides free access to various academic journals and textbooks. However, in November 2022, the U.S. federal government shut down the digital resource, thus leaving many students without a way to get their textbooks.
“I know some people were coming to the service desk saying that they couldn’t get their books and saying that they didn’t know what to do. So, Rob and I applied for the March fellowship in ethical leadership to kind of look at how students pirate books, look at their morals, how they view the morality of pirating these books, and then propose ways of stopping textbook piracy,” said Dittbrenner.
Both Dittbrenner and Sieczkiewicz worked tirelessly to develop two surveys to collect their data, one geared towards students and one for faculty. Following extensive advertisement efforts across campus, 31 students and 36 faculty members participated in the study. However, gathering this data was not without its challenges, particularly getting student responses.
“The biggest challenge we found was student reluctance to complete a survey about potentially illegal activity,” explained Sieczkiewicz.
By making the surveys anonymous, they were able to gather useful input from both students and faculty. Specifically, there were 17 faculty participants from the School of Humanities, 10 from the School of Natural and Social Sciences, three from the Sigmund Weis School of Business and one from the School of the Arts.
In terms of student responses, many of them admitted to using pirated textbooks and two reasons dominated the responses: cost and efficiency.
“I would say that broadly, a lot of students argue that piracy is moral to some degree because of the reasons I listed earlier. Textbooks are very inaccessible, costly and inconvenient. Students everywhere they’re having to choose between food or their textbooks, and that’s not worth it. Nobody deserves to go through that,” said Dittbrenner.
Prior to this experience, Sieczkiewicz knew students used pirated textbooks to save money, but he was unaware of students’ opinions regarding convenience.
“That was eye opening to me as a librarian because we invest a lot of money through our collaboration with the Student Government Association SGA, our textbook reserve program, and buying the latest textbooks. And we understand that it can be a frustration for students, especially for eBooks, that the platforms aren’t as user friendly as they would like and you can’t just simply download a PDF,” said Sieczkiewicz.
Generally, in terms of faculty, the majority held the belief that pirating textbooks is unethical.
“I don’t consider it ethical, but I understand why it’s done. The price of textbooks is generally outrageous, and not because of the content — at least in my field. There is all kinds of wasted space, on the page, ‘digest’-type information or goofy stuff to make it more ‘user friendly’ or less intimidating or I’m not sure what. The online material is not much better. Whenever possible, I try to use textbooks produced in other countries because they are far less expensive and exhibit more complex thinking,” wrote one anonymous professor.
So, the real question is why does this matter? What will this research help universities accomplish?
“I’m a pretty staunch believer that textbooks are inaccessible, costly and inconvenient. And we cannot solve the problem of piracy until we first solve the problems with these textbooks,” said Dittbrenner.
Sieczkiewicz heavily discussed the need for libraries to be at the forefront of this fight by offering more open access textbooks and educational materials to eliminate the risks students take when pirating textbooks.
“And we want to reduce students risk not just to lawsuits, but to viruses and other potential consequences. And we feel like a great way to reduce piracy is to as Haley said, increase the number of open textbooks on campus and by having continued conversation with faculty and students about the whole intent of our research,” he said.
The team has continued this conversation through various academic presentations. On campus, they have presented their findings to the Forum of Undergraduate Student Editors (FUSE) and Haley presented at Senior Scholar Day. Additionally, they got to showcase their discoveries to the Association of College Libraries in Central PA (ACLCP) and at the Pennsylvania Library Association. Haley especially found these experiences helpful because she hopes to become an Open Access librarian upon graduation from SU.
“Just getting to network with people who are in the field currently and being able to talk to them, get their encouragement. It was really, really nice,” she said.
Going forward, they hope to publish their work in a journal or magazine geared towards librarians.
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