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When a textbook co-authored by the English veterinarian Dr. Richard Wall about parasitic insects was published almost three decades ago, bloodsucking lice were classified under the taxonomic order Phthiraptera.
Many years later, in 2021, it was determined that the insects should be grouped alongside nonparasitic bark lice and book lice. Hence, the bloodsuckers were brought under the order Psocodea, and Phthiraptera was relegated to infraorder status — an intermediate taxonomic level.
Pity the student still studying from Veterinary Entomology: Arthropod Ectoparasites of Veterinary Importance, the content of which has since been updated in another book, Veterinary Parasitology, published last year.
That first, now-outdated edition happens to be available for free on Vet-eBooks, a website that offers pirated copies of veterinary textbooks. Should students go there, Wall isn't too bothered about losing the measly royalty of less than £1 (US$1.35) he gets for each legitimate book sale.
"What I'm mainly annoyed about is that the first edition is available for free online, and the later books, which are much better, aren't available for free — as far as I know," he said. "So the students are downloading out-of-date information. Since the first book was published in 1997, we've corrected a lot of things that now aren't considered quite right."
The risk of digesting inaccurate information is one of the many perils of textbook piracy, a phenomenon that became more common in the late 20th century, when the dawn of the internet allowed people to disseminate pirated versions of intellectual property more easily. But unlike music piracy, which has decreased significantly since Napster was brought down by legal action in 2001, book piracy — whether of textbooks or other types of books — remains a persistent problem. And it could be worsening, as higher living costs and soaring student debt, particularly in the United States, tempt students to seek out bootleg copies to make ends meet.
Piracy may be on the rise, some data suggests
Spending by U.S. college students on textbooks has fallen dramatically in the past decade, judging from annual surveys conducted by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), a trade association for the collegiate retailing industry. During the 2024-25 academic year, total spending on required course materials averaged $341 per student, according to a survey of around 12,400 students at colleges in the U.S. and Canada. That's about half the $701 spent in 2007-08.
Various reasons are hypothesized for the fall, including the rise of inclusive access programs, which offer students digital versions of textbooks at reduced prices through college bookstores; the cost is included in the student's tuition. Some colleges have even removed textbooks from their curriculums. The Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine is a case in point. It eliminated textbooks in 2016 in a bid to save students $6,700 over four years. "Instructors provide their own notes, primarily, although in limited cases, they refer to texts for which our library has purchased electronic access for patron use," Dr. James K. Roush, an associate dean, said.
The NACS surveys indicate another possible driver of falling book sales: rising piracy. During the 2024-25 academic year, more than 23% of the surveyed students reported downloading a course material "for free without proper authorization," according to the NACS. That's around double the 11% in the 2021-22 academic year.
Elsewhere, piracy is even more rampant. In a survey in 2024 of students at universities, vocational colleges and business academies in Denmark, 51% of 602 respondents reported having downloaded a pirated textbook. The proportion had remained steady at around 50% since 2019, according to the research firm Epinion.
The availability of pirated textbooks isn't confined to vocation-specific sites. Textbook piracy is prolific across all academic fields, facilitated by so-called shadow libraries like Z-Library, which had domain names seized by the FBI in 2022 but has seemingly resurfaced under different domain names. Complicating matters, at least one fake version of Z-Library was set up by scammers, who collected millions of users' personal information, passwords and, possibly, payment information, according to a 2024 report in Cybernews. Z-Library also has remained continuously available on the dark web via the anonymous browser Tor, according to various media reports and social media posts.
Vet-eBooks has been operating since at least 2020, judging by saved pages on the Wayback Machine, which is operated by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit. Vet-eBooks didn't reply to a request for comment.
One book on the site made available for free — The Small Animal Veterinary Nerdbook — is published by the VIN Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the Veterinary Information Network, an online community for the profession and parent of the VIN News Service. The site's owners removed the book last month after the VIN Foundation's attorney sent them a takedown notice citing the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Hundreds of books are on the site, many freely available. Others can be downloaded for a one-time payment that offers subscribers unlimited access to all the books in the collection.
Major textbook publishers didn't respond to detailed questions from VIN News about why so many of their books are available on sites like Vet-eBooks. They provided only prepared statements saying that they are aware of the problem and take it seriously.
"We take piracy seriously because it harms authors, editors, students, educators and the quality of professional learning," Wiley said by email. "We use a range of content-protection approaches but do not comment on specific enforcement actions or investigative methods. We urge students to use lawful sources because pirated copies may create legal, security and quality risks."
Elsevier said it uses an "an array of tools" to combat piracy including issuing takedown notices or taking legal action. "We have both legal and business representatives actively addressing the illegal sharing of our copyrighted content," it said in an email.
All the way to Egypt
Elizabeth Green, a former publisher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has gone to great lengths to pursue textbook pirates. Her investigations led all the way to Egypt — with some help from lawyers in the U.S.
Green is the founder of VetMedux, a provider of veterinary education resources. The company, which today is owned by Instinct Science, a veterinary software provider, holds the copyright to the Plumbs Veterinary Drug Handbook, published on its behalf by Wiley.
Green saw pirated copies of the handbook pop up frequently. Typically, an unauthorized edition would appear for free on websites such as Vet-eBooks. One time, a university outside the U.S. offered a free pirated version, she said, perhaps thinking they were doing their students a favor.
"Wiley had a really good system for scanning and looking for those kinds of books, so we were always getting notifications from them," Green said in an interview. "And most of the time, when Wiley gave them the DMCA notice, they would take them down pretty quickly."
One site, however, didn't respond to a DMCA takedown notice, prompting Green to hire a copyright lawyer. The law firm traced the offending site to Egypt and proceeded to hire a lawyer in that country, who contacted the website in question. Green said the book was taken down immediately.
Green said students who use unauthorized sites are vulnerable to hacking. "You're risking getting malware on your computer and losing your identity, because that's what you're also looking at with a lot of these characters," she said. "People aren't doing this just to help out poor students."
Not in it for the money
Authors of some of the textbooks available for free on Vet-eBooks expressed mixed views about piracy when contacted by VIN News. Some, like Mary Ellen Goldberg, a veterinary technician specialist in Florida, weren't particularly concerned.
As co-editor of Pain Management for Veterinary Technicians and Nurses, Goldberg put "years' worth of work" into the book's production. But, she said, she was making only about 5 cents per hour for the editing work.
"The amount that publishers pay the editor is minuscule in comparison to a work of fiction or nonfiction or a textbook that is utilized selling hundreds of thousands of copies," she said. "I am sure I am not affected [by piracy]."
Goldberg "absolutely" sympathizes with cash-strapped students who are tempted to download pirated copies, and she believes that textbook companies are doing their best to combat piracy.
Others concurred that authoring and editing textbooks, in most instances, isn't a particularly lucrative endeavor.
"Nobody really writes a textbook for the money or, at least, it's rare to make any serious money from a textbook," said Wall, the textbook author in England. In his experience, publishers typically pay authors royalties of about 10% of the wholesale price of each book sale.
"Writing textbooks is certainly a labor of love," agreed Dr. Theresa Rizzi, head of the veterinary pathobiology department at Oklahoma State University veterinary school. Rizzi spent a couple of years co-authoring Atlas of Canine and Feline Peripheral Blood Smears.
Rizzi surmises that publishers could do more to fight piracy but wonders whether the expense of litigating, in at least some circumstances, would exceed any financial losses from piracy.
Still, she sees pursuing legal action as a worthwhile endeavor in certain instances: Rizzi is part of a class action against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which is being sued by authors who accuse it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot, Claude.
Rizzi doesn't sympathize with students who download pirated books to save money. "The cost of an education you chose is no reason to steal," she said. "Most veterinary programs have libraries where students can obtain materials needed. What's preventing students from accessing that material?"
Wall said he's never met a student who admitted to pirating a textbook, and he muses whether an exam question about the taxonomy of parasitic lice could catch someone.
"If a student still said they were in the old order name, you'd wonder, why are they doing that when I've taught them something different?" he said. "It would be a bit of a giveaway."
Correction: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this story incorrectly identified Mary Ellen Goldberg as a veterinarian. She is a veterinary technician specialist.