Publishing houses now charging for the service of withholding information

A textbook for a university course I am teaching went out of print this year. The book is "Texturing and Modeling: a Procedural Approach", published by Morgan Kaufmann. The book is more than ten years old by now, but it's the only textbook on the specialized, narrow subject, and it's still good.

The book going out of print is understandable. A book that sells perhaps only a thousand copies per year isn't good business. However, nowadays there are e-books, and publishing houses can sell electronic copies of books that cost absolutely nothing to produce. Sure enough, an "e-book" with the same title appeared on the market. If that e-book would have been the same text, things would have been sort of okay, despite the fact that the e-book carries several restrictions that the printed book didn't have (you can't sell it, and you can't lend it to someone).

However, the electronic version turned out to be the first edition from 1994 instead of the third edition from 2003. The old edition is utterly useless, outdated, inadequately edited, badly illustrated and in black and white, and the e-book version was a low resolution scan which made it even worse. Despite that, the DRM-restricted e-book cost as much as the printed third edition used to cost. Needless to say, I advised my students not to be tricked into paying a premium price for substandard goods. This year, there were enough used books to meet the demand with some students sharing books. Next year, I will either have to distribute an illegal copy of the book or tell the students that no literature is available.

Nice work, Morgan Kaufmann.