Sell Someone Else's Book On Lulu!

Albert Schueller writes "Lulu is a place where authors can self-publish their books. It's a nice response to exorbitant college textbook prices. In an interesting twist, looks like you might be able to get away with selling other people's books on Lulu and reap a tidy profit. The Lulu offering Calculus Twirly Exponentials by Dave Stuart appears to be simply a high quality scan of the much more well-known, and expensive, Calculus: Early Transcendentals 6th ed. by James Stewart. Compare the preview images available for each at Lulu and Amazon respectively."

I'm not sure what you're looking at...

[mutube]

1. Go to the Amazon page for Calculus: Early Transcendentals [amazon.com]
2. Click the cover image (Click to look inside!)
3. Go to the Lulu page for Calculus Twirly Exponentials Volume 1 [lulu.com]
4. Click on the Preview link (under the cover image)
5. Look at the cover page of both: they are different
6. Look at the first page of both (and every page after): they are the same

I've refreshed to make sure it's not a temporary bug with Lulu that has been fixed. It happens every time.

Re:Confession: I actually RTFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

See page 12 of the Lulu preview for an explanation. They aren't trying to hide anything.

Re:The only absurd part of this...

[jadrian]

Fair price actually. The book is over 1100 pages long. I actually own a version that comes in two volumes, so that would be $85 each. They are used for 3 or 4 semester calculus courses and the quality of the material is really good. It's money well spent.

Re:Author discusses source material in lulu previe

[Kadaki]

The preview doesn't seem to let you go further than page 12, so I can't say for sure, but that explanation appears to be a smoke screen to hide the fact that it is in fact a copy of Calculus: Early Transcendentals. The copyright page is definitely taken from the original textbook and the table of contents appears to be as well.

Response from Lulu

[jbcox]

Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. Claiming copyrighted material as your own is a clear violation of our policies and we are pulling down this content from our site right now. If at any time you come across questionable material on our site, please do not hesitate to contact me at [e-mail].

Re:The only absurd part of this...

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to know why there aren't any "open source" maths textbooks?

That would be news to all the authors of open-source math books: http://linear.ups.edu/opentexts.html [ups.edu]