There was a time when ebooks were herald as replacements of their traditional printed counterparts. But years have passed and we have witnessed no dramatic change. I have recently completed my Masters and I can say with certainty that although there is a folder for ebooks in almost every student’s computer, however, the files in that folder are seldom visited. Why you may ask? Because the same machine that displays the book to a student also acts as a portal to a sea of distractions called the internet. Mind, left to its own device, would prefer surfing multitude of useless information over devoting its attention to a context restricted subject.

I have always been an admirer of printed books and a supporter of ebooks. I have visited plenty of book vendors in my home country and I am a firsthand witness to the book piracy that is rampant in third world countries. The root cause is simple, printed books from North American publishers are priced way above an average student’s purchasing power. The demand is still there, so what ends up happening is that small scale vendors download pirated versions of ebooks from the internet, print them and then sell them at dirt cheap prices. The whole process supersedes the original publisher and the author of the book and they remain uncompensated for their hard work.

Clearly, there is an opportunity to disrupt the established equilibrium. In order for a solution to be viable, it should satisfy two important conditions:

  • The author and the publisher must receive a cut from the transaction.
  • The user is given some form an incentive, outside the moral realm, to purchase a printed book at a price augmented by the publisher's and the author's royalties.

For a while now, I have been fiddling with a solution that meets both of the above objectives. Instead of allowing a single printing agency to print the book, publishers should make a printable copy of ebook and allow small scale vendors to purchase the printable copy at a nominal price. The problem of a vendor creating more than one copy from that ebook will still be there. To counter it, the publisher can assign a unique id to each copy of ebook downloaded. That id could be used once by the customer to register his or her book on LinkedIn or another platform. In this way, to take the credit for reading or at least purchasing that particular book, a student will be allowed to enter the unique id just once.

The solution can further be expanded to make sure that Universities with international affiliations ensure that their students have printed textbooks from only accredited sources. There are a lot of moving parts associated with the solution, which initially might require significant time and resources, however, once deployed the system will be autonomous, providing a steady revenue stream for the deserving parties.