Patent Granted for System to Prevent Printed Textbook Piracy

Textbook publishers are in an existential crisis. A survey conducted at the University of California-Riverside found that 74 percent of the students did not purchase any textbook. Publishers also compete against themselves in a used-book market increasingly nimble due to the Internet.

In 2007, Vogel met with Pat Schroeder, then president of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to discuss his Web-based system. Schroeder believed that copyright software protection, known as digital rights management (DRM), would alleviate the problem. Today, hackers crack DRMs in record time and legal recourse seems hopeless.