From Geekosystem:
… With some students hoping to beat the high cost textbooks by renting digital versions of textbooks, a group called the Library Pirates say they can unlock rental books and plan to distribute them online for free.
Here’s how the scheme, called Hire-a-Pirate, works. A student, or a group of students, rents a textbook from an eBook distributor. These are usually sold at discounted rates, and are only accessible for a preset time — a semester, a quarter, etc. — at different price points. Once purchased, the buyer of the book sends the download info to Library Pirates who nab the book and strip it of its DRM. Reformed into a free and permanent PDF, the pirates make the book available via torrent to the purchaser(s). Oh, and anyone else that happens to want it.
This is only one of the tools Library Pirates are offering to make more textbooks available for free online. In addition to their already voluminous library of torrents, they’ve also released a photo application that automatically crops and resizes photographs of textbooks. Their goal is to turn any camera into a book-scanner, and they claim a dedicated student can scan an entire 500-page book in under two hours.
