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Issue of the day: College students rely on pirated books

Inexpensive books: Books of various titles are displayed at a kiosk in the Senen area in Central Jakarta

The Jakarta Post
Mon, September 29, 2014

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Issue of the day: College students rely on pirated books

I

span class="inline inline-center">Inexpensive books: Books of various titles are displayed at a kiosk in the Senen area in Central Jakarta. Buyers could purchase both original and pirated books at many kiosks in the area. JP/Ricky Yudhistira

Sept. 22, p9

Arfany, a 17-year-old freshman in history at Jakarta State University (UNJ), was chatting with four friends while waiting for some books to be wrapped at Senen Market in Central Jakarta on Wednesday afternoon. '€œWe need to wait for the bookstore owner to collect them from the storeroom,'€ she said, adding that she and her friends had purchased 19 texts.

Arfany said many of her college friends ordered the same kind of books because they were so much cheaper. '€œWe pay only Rp 25,000 [US$2.10] per copy,'€ she said, adding that the price of the same book in mainstream bookstores could be up to Rp 80,000.

Arfany said she knew the books were pirated. '€œHowever, the price difference is massive and college students like me prefer to use the money for other stuff,'€ she said. '€œHowever, I still buy novels or magazines in major bookstores like Gramedia and Gunung Agung,'€ she added.


Your comments:

It is an abject failure of the government and also a breach of the Constitution that schooling is not subsidized as the door to the future.  It is even sadder because Indonesia has achieved (and is continuing to achieve) amazing things at the more basic level (high literacy rates and the success of the national language).

Personally, I think these '€œknock-offs'€ are a blessing. They enable the young and not-so-rich to gain and learn and hopefully lift themselves and their families out of poverty and the vicious circle they are trapped in!

Forget about the copyrights and the patents, they are Westerns ideas designed to make the rich even richer! They don'€™t care about you and I, we can all die. They just want their money. For example, as far as I can remember, Ebola has been around for ages but they never developed a cure or vaccine because the people who suffer and die of Ebola are poor African villagers. In other words, the money wasn'€™t there.

Now, they are developing a vaccine because the World Health Organization (WHO) is pouring in enormous amounts of money and Western countries are running scared. Remember too Thailand and India fighting against manufacturing regulations. They didn'€™t care and today we have lots of '€œgeneric'€ drugs against diabetes etc, and lots of suffering and lives have been spared.

Pauloh

A bank will lend you money and help you make more money if you can prove that you have money. Writers and publishers are just like a bank, they don'€™t care who you are, what they care about is that your money will help them produce more books and make them richer.

Copyrights and patents is the system created to protect the segregation between the haves and the have-nots.

My advice to the poor people who cannot afford to buy an official copy, do not hesitate, buy a pirated one.

Gatot Santoso Wibowo

According to this principle, anybody selling a product '€œdoesn'€™t care who you are'€. It is a complex issue for sure, but we must at least acknowledge that the buying and selling of pirated books is theft and only drives up prices of originals. Regardless of whether the publishers are unfair in their pricings, there is no excuse for theft.

A major challenge in the local publishing industry is that editing and writing work is poorly paid and lacks quality. Books written by scholars and politicians are so full of errors (factual and grammatical) that they would never be printed elsewhere.

Sooner or later, if the publishing industry continues to lose profitability, education will be the loser as the quality of the materials will continue to diminish.

Perhaps universities could look at investing more in libraries, photocopying services (a student copying select pages is generally accepted) and used book sales. Certainly in my own student days, I couldn'€™t always afford new textbooks and had to do this.

Ketoprak

Last time I checked, some of those college set texts are very expensive: around US$20 to $150 on Amazon. How can the majority of college students, so poor they can barely support their monthly expenses in this developing country, buy the original versions of those books?

We might be buying pirated books, but my principle is to do my homework, reports, quizzes and exams by myself. Hopefully, these qualities imbued by college education (critical thinking, originality of work) you are talking about still exist in me and many other Indonesian college students who struggle everyday to support themselves.

Roth Schwert

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