The Napster of textbooks has closed. Just like the music sharing site, Textbook Torrents gestated on university campuses and threatened an industry--but it appears that publishers may have won the first round by shuttering the file sharing site.

"TextBook Torrents won't be coming back," the site administrator Geekman told TorrentFreak. "We got word from several credible sources that there was a lawsuit in the works against myself personally," he explained. In the comments section, a number of readers bemoaned the loss of the site, pointing to a hunger for cheaper digital books.

In July, The Chronicle of Higher Education examined Textbook Torrents, a pirate website that "promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations." One publisher estimated that between 60,000 and 250,000 different textbook files were available for download on such site. In June, the site had 70,000 members. (Via TeleRead.)