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And the Digital Textbook Scams Have Begun – TouchTextbooks.com (CollegeBooksFree.info)

Everyone was watching this morning as Apple unveiled their new digital textbook tools, and that includes the scammers. I’ve just gotten my first email from a site that promises to offer an unlimited lifetime access to over 3 million digital textbooks for only $50.

What’s even better is that TouchTextbooks.com offered me a 75% affiliates commission. Yeah, I’m sure this is a legit site. Pull the other one, it has bells on.

Update: Apparently the site has changed its URL to www.collegebooksfree.info. It is still a scam site.

I’ve covered similar sites in the past, and this site bears a striking resemblance to one of them. Here’s the text of the email I received:

At the moment, we have over 3 million fully licensed textbooks which users can download directly to their iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle, or any other handheld device.

The students simply pay a one-time joining fee of $49.95 and they get lifetime membership to download as many textbooks as they want from our own private, fully hosted database.

We would like to invite you to start promoting Touch Textbooks to receive 75% commission for referring customers to us. For example, if you send us just 5 customers a day with a banner ad on your site, you would be earning over $1,100 a week!

The commission and the general terms make this site sound an awful lot like MyPadMedia, a scam site that I covered back in July. That site charged you a $50 fee to provide links to free ebook sites, all of which you could have found on your own.

I don’t see a good reason to visit the site and confirm the scam. TouchTextbooks.com has the stench of  a scam site, and it is so obvious that paying money to confirm it would be redundant. That claim to have 3 million titles is enough to give away the scam; sites that sell digital textbooks legally cannot make the same boast. For example, Kno only stocks round 100k titles, and they’re completely aboveboard. Also, the cross-platform claim is another tipoff; no legit site can do that.

But I did put my money down. Yep, it’s  scam site.

First, TouchTextbooks.com was lying about the 3 million titles they offer. Their index only shows 75 thousand titles listed, and they all appear to be in PDF. That’s not exactly very compatible with the Kindle or with most smartphones (like they claim.)

Second, I just got a confirmation email from Plimus, the same folks behind MyPadMedia. I could have stopped right there; clearly they are running  second scam.

Update: Plimus is the payment processor, not the pirate. But MyPadMedia now redirects to the above pirate site, so there’s little doubt that they are related.

But let’s take  look at the content. It turns out that this is a slightly different scam from what I expected; all of the dozen or so ebooks I checked were sold elsewhere for $150 or more. The copies found on TouchTextbooks.com are clearly pirated.

What, do you think someone will sell an obscure textbook via Google Books for $191 and then license  copy to TouchTextbooks.com for everyone to download for free? That doesn’t make any sense. Plus a number of the titles weren’t available as digital textbooks anywhere, and that should rise a red flag.

Yep, it’s a scam site. Buyer beware.

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Comments


bobiko January 20, 2012 um 12:07 pm

Hi, there are the pirates of library.nu with 450000 titles as they claim. They want PayPal or amazon coupons to promote you from newbie to regular members. The bitches at avaxhome copied their links with a scam service as you note, 130000 titles with subscription.And the Chinese pirates of ebookee.


bobiko January 20, 2012 um 12:10 pm

Fuck them all I hope they’ll have the fate of magaupload.


Mary February 13, 2012 um 4:10 pm

They claim to have the textbook "wombatology" for sale. What more do you need to know?


Dale Hammerschmidt February 13, 2012 um 4:20 pm

They offer the option to check the database for the titles you need immediately, so that you don’t have to pay if they cannot serve you.

So I entered a textbook name which I know to be recurrent, with at least a half-dozen popular books that differ only by subtitle. It simply reported that they had it, and invited me to pay and download.

I then tried "Wombatology," which they also claimed to have, as well as "Dictyliosteliology." Amazingly, they had BOTH available for immediate download!!!

Slick, but perhaps too slick. A good example of the old maxim: "If it sounds too good to be true, it almost always IS too good to be true."

Dale


iasky February 17, 2012 um 7:21 am

They have any text you type in! They had "OHMYMYWHATASCAM" ! Not too clever of a scam. I agree with Dale "If it sounds too good…..Step away from the scam! They offered me unlimited textbooks for only $19.95 for today only…but wait due to overworked servers, I can get the same deal for today but I better hurry!


Ken February 17, 2012 um 11:29 pm

As a textbook author, I sent an e-mail reply to these people:

I have a few questions about your interesting offer.

(1) If you are offering people the opportunity for free downloads of the college textbooks I have written, how are you paying me the royalties to which I am entitled?

(2) What arrangements did you make with my publisher to acquire the right to offer free downloads of my books?

(3) Why is it that every purely fictitious or misworded title that I type into your website’s search engine — such as scrambled and misworded variations of my own book titles — comes up saying "Available – download now!" when such textbooks don’t even exist? What would a person receive who paid the membership fee to your organization and then went to download a nonexistent title?

(4) Is there some reason we should not seek legal action against your company for copyright violation, consumer fraud, or both?

************************

Of course they haven’t replied, nor will I hold my breath waiting to hear from them. I put the faux title "Up Your Nose With a Rubber Hose" in the site’s search box today and sure enough, it said this title is "Available — Download Now!"


Ballsy Pirate Site Now Capitalizing on ‘The Hunger Games’ Movie (TheNovelNetwork.com) – The Digital Reader April 3, 2012 um 11:59 am

[…] written about a number of scam & pirate sites in the past couple years, including MyPadMedia, Touch Textbooks, and others. I’ve seen so much that little surprises me anymore.Which is why I was surprised […]


Sheogorath July 13, 2015 um 8:51 am

Also, the cross-platform claim is another tipoff; no legit site can do that.
ORLY? Because you can download ebooks from manybooks.net which can be accessed from PCs, laptops, netbooks, tablets, and phones. Also, manybooks.net is definitely a legitimate website, being a free mirror of Project Gutenberg.

Tim Wilhoit July 13, 2015 um 11:00 am

I’m not aware that ManyBooks has any textbooks unless they’re pre-1923 Project Gutenberg books. Current textbooks are mostly likely DRM protected and those would not be (legitimately) available cross-platform. The only site that would have cross-platform e-books that could also be considered textbooks would be O’Reilly’s and they only have technology ebooks.

Sheogorath July 13, 2015 um 11:37 am

To repeat myself: Also, manybooks.net is definitely a legitimate website, being a free mirror of Project Gutenberg. Please acquire a reading comprehension ability ASAP.

Tim Wilhoit July 13, 2015 um 12:20 pm

Reading comprehension? The title of this article is "And the Digital Textbook Scams Have Begun…" Again, how many currently used textbooks are available on ManyBooks? Link to a few of those, would you?

Everyone knows that there are loads of legitimate sources for public domain books. That’s not the topic of this article.

Sheogorath July 13, 2015 um 12:28 pm

Not the point. The point is that Nate generalised and thus made a statement about all ebook sites. If, on the other hand, he had said, "Also, the cross-platform claim is another tipoff; no legit textbook site can do that," I wouldn’t have had any issues with the article. Like I said, bone up on reading comprehension.

Tim Wilhoit July 13, 2015 um 12:48 pm

No, you "generalized" it when you took one sentence out of context and proceeded to set up a straw man. Let’s include the previous two sentences to reestablish the context:

"That claim to have 3 million titles is enough to give away the scam; sites that sell digital textbooks legally cannot make the same boast. For example, Kno only stocks round 100k titles, and they’re completely aboveboard. Also, the cross-platform claim is another tipoff; no legit site can do that."

Taken in context, anyone (except you, apparently) can easily understand Nate was referring to digital textbooks and not Oliver Twist or Ivanhoe. Including the word "textbook" in that particular sentence is unnecessary and redundant.

I’m done, troll someone else.


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