Media companies moved into the online world with trepidation, seeing the opportunities in providing online music and movie viewing and downloading for a fee, but also fearing copyright violation.  Many in the music and movie audience, especially young people, believed the media companies were gouging them with high prices for DVDs and CDs, and felt little remorse at procuring and providing  free downloads. Textbook publishers also had reason for concern at the ravages of digital piracy, but they were somewhat shielded by the time and labor intensive process of scanning an entire textbook.  We learn in, Digital Domain: First It Was Song Downloads. Now It's Organic Chemistry, that the sense of outrage in music and movie downloaders is as nothing compared to that of some college and university textbook buyers who were, until recently, a large and profitable captive audience to textbook publishers. Motivated by a spirit of vengeance, some angry students have taken on the laborious project of scanning entire textbooks and making them available online for free downloading.  The process of scanning is a lengthy one, but as time marches on, more and more of these pirated editions become available online.  Bleeding profits is not a new problem for publishers.  The textbook publishing industry has long been faced with the problem of loss of sales resulting from the  frequent re-selling of used books.  Digital files simply add another arena to the ongoing struggle of maintaining or maximizing profitability. Moving material online presents opportunities and challenges for textbook publishers.   They  can use two models for online sales.  One is to lease the material for a certain period of time, via subscriptions.   This has the advantage of diminishing the demand for used copies, as the most recently updated edition is always available online, whereas few or none may be available in hard copy.  Online access allows for more creativity:  supplementary and multimedia material may be included as well as the basic text.  We may be moving towards  a "...hybrid market: print will do what it does best, and digital will do what it does best. " Another online model is simply to sell a copy as an individual e-book that permanently belongs to the user, but with legal and technological  barriers to sharing.  This has the advantage of cutting out the middleman and retaining more profit for the publisher.  Both models remain targets of digital pirates.  Digital rights management has  not proven invulnerable to hacking, and even subscription based texts can be made available by copying and pasting to someone with enough determination.  In addition to expending effort in securing the technology,  publishers have people scouring the Internet for sites that host the pirated files.   There have been successes, with some sites being forced to close, or to cease hosting the offending file.  However,  some of the hosting sites are based overseas, where laws may be different, and the file hosts are unreachable through legal means. What do you think about these issues?  Are you comfortable reading textbooks on a computer or pda?  Do you think publishers charge unfair prices and are thus themselves responsible for the problem they are having with piracy?  Would your opinion of digital piracy change if it was demonstrated to you that the publishers are not making unfair profit on their material -- or what if it was proven that they were?