Sell Someone Else's Book On Lulu! 260
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."
The only absurd part of this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that they want $170 for a book on calculus.
-Rick
How is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
MAFIAA go after casual downloaders, destroying people for having downloaded a few songs which are usually freely available on the radio anyway. In the meantime, people are scanning and selling other people's books for profit - and getting away with it. Wasn't this exactly the sort of thing that copyright was supposed to prevent in the first place?
Re:Confession: I actually RTFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...
Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.
Re:College Textbook Prices (Score:5, Insightful)
A little off topic I guess, but how did college professors get around the ethical challenge of selling their own books to their class as a requirement and charging whatever they felt like for it?
~S
They downplay it by never using or even mentioning the required book in class.
Re:College Textbook Prices (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse is that many university bookstores will mark up prices above the MSRP. I remember once as a student I found the exact same book in both the Textbooks section and the normal bookstore area. The one in Textbooks was 20% more expensive. And they wonder why students started buying their books on Amazon.
Re:College Textbook Prices (Score:3, Insightful)
It's tricky, because professors often do have a reasonably good justification. I mean, of all the physics textbooks out there, presumably the one the prof wrote himself is the one that covers the material closest to the way he thinks it should be covered. It's also almost certainly the textbook whose contents he's most familiar with, whose exercises he can most reliably answer questions about, etc.
Re:Copyright infringement, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
The site is going too slow for me to see where the "seller" is. If they're off-shored appropriately, the list will end at 3.1, with a sidenote of lawyers pitching fits and trying to find all the parties to sue. "John Doe" works well in the US, but if Mr. John Doe lives in rural Obscuristain, it's a lot harder to serve him.
Article Submitter is a Math Professor / Author? (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...
Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.
No, the parasites are the ones who change the edition of the book every 6-12 months, making the used book market nonexistant and allowing for inflation like this (usually in the realm of kickbacks to teachers/schools to "encourage" them to cycle out the editions on command).
$225 list price for a goddamned math book? Apparently selling textbooks allows for some really high quality drugs.
Having said that, note that the article submitter's name first comes up on Google as a Math Professor in Washington State [whitman.edu] who teaches Calculus 3. Even more amusing is the fact that Whitman's Math Department uses Lulu [whitman.edu] to sell their own line of College math books [lulu.com].
Let me interject real quick with the statement that I do not intend to suggest any shenanigans -- I just thought it was really unusual. In a good way. I've never heard of a college designing, testing, and printing their own textbooks -- and at vastly better prices ($9 instead of $225) to boot! And that's assuming you don't just want to download the PDF for your iPad or whatnot.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not absurd at all. What's absurd is that every year, you need to use a newly published calculus book to teach mathematics. Calculus hasn't changed all that much in the last 10-15 years to warrant needing a new edition every year or two.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:2, Insightful)
$170 is a little high, but to be fair, if that's the book I think it is, it would easily more than cover three semesters of calc class. $60 for a textbook for a semester class really isn't that bad.
The obnoxious part about it then is not so much the high price right off the bat, it's the fact that you're forced to get all three classes at once. (Even the shorter, volume-based editions mentioned by another poster don't go too far toward fixing this issue.)
had it happen to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had this happen to me, with a copylefted textbook I wrote. I think the situation was simply that the guy who did it knew the book was freely available as a PDF, but didn't realize it was possible to buy a copy in print, so he just set it up on lulu so he could produce one copy for himself. Can't remember if he was complying with all the terms of the license or not. I contacted him about it, he explained what he was trying to do, and we straightened everything out. I think lulu had by default put him as the author, since the book was made on his account, but he wasn't intentionally trying to claim authorship of my work.
Anyway, this seems like the biggest non-story ever. Lulu is a print-on-demand publishing business. They're one of these online businesses that is able to make a profit because they have no human beings paid to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis. I use them for my books, and I'm fairly happy with them, although there have been a few hassles here and there. When you set up a book to be produced and sold by lulu, you upload a pdf and click through on a form that says you agree to a certain contract. The contract says that you have to be the copyright owner. Sounds like whoever put these scans online clicked through the contract, but is violating it. Nobody at lulu reads your book when you upload it. They're not a full-service publishing house with acquisition editors, copy editors, etc. Whoever posted the slashdot story could have just clicked on the "Report This Content to Lulu" link and told them it was a copyright violation, and presumably lulu would have dealt with the issue. But I guess it's more fun to have the story run on slashdot.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's actually a relatively fair price, however I once spent $80 for a text book that was maybe 200 pages and we opened I think 4 times in the entire semester (10 years ago so memory has a few faults :) ), and that is definitely NOT money well spent.
Re:Copyright infringement, anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
>Sounds like a good way to get sued.
It is. For all the misconception about copyright (to wit, copyright being a good weapon to use against people distributing your work), copyright's main strength is that it can strongly protect you from someone else distributing your work, claiming it as their own, *and suing you* on the claim that YOU are the copycat. That direction of things is lost in the noise in all the copyright discussion, because it's neither common nor sexy nor a basis for a business model.
Extreme Irony (Score:2, Insightful)
Either you are extremely obtuse, or you don't understand the purpose and meaning of the US Constitution.
If you are not a USAian, I suppose we should give you some slack. If you are, we should give you a lot of flack.
While it is true that James Stewart is not a USAian, and it is true that the specifics of the US Constitution are specific to the US context, the principles are universal.
If you give a person absolute rights over any intangible, you might as well grant that person a title of nobility along with power to supercede any Constitution your government may claim to be established under. Yeah, yeah, you're now thinking "nutcase!" etc.
How does a person prove beyond doubt that the forbidden thing is not in his/her head?
Absolute power over intangibles is tantamount to power over private thought.
Therefore, the US Constitution provides for limits on rights over what we know call "intellectual property", specifically, unspecified time limits. The Constitution specified time limits because other limits would be inherent in the context of the rights and responsibilities of a person getting a lease on a piece of the public commons, and trying to put more than that into the Constitution would have tread seriously on the rights reserved to the individual states.
I haven't read the Berne convention carefully enough, I suppose I should, but if it were to be interpreted to make copyright absolute and immutable, it would be a declaration of war against every country in the world. So they have to tread carefully.
If you don't understand that much, shut up before you hurt yourself. Go back and read the copyright laws and read up on the fundamental theories under which they are interpreted. Then re-read the post.
What the OP said was only that the copyright owner has no right to absolute control, and that copyright is not going to _prevent_ pirating. (I think that he implicitly acknowledged that this might be a real case of pirating, to the extent that "pirating" is a valid description of the activity of making illicit profit from another person's creation.)
It is now the copyright owner's job to go after the guy selling what appears to be a copy, prove it's a copy in court, and get the court to take corrective/punitive action as necessary. The current copyright laws will, however, get in his way because of the so-called "artists' associations" efforts to establish effective absolute rights.
It's also the responsibility of passersby (such as we) to log into lulu if we have an account and tell them that there may be a problem here.
(Emphasis on _may_, as it turns out. There may not be a slam-dunk case of infringement here.)
But no amount of legitimate copyright law can prevent illegal/illicit/immoral copying until after the illegal activity has occured at least once, and that is precisely where those (not-) artists' associations are going way too far.
And the real irony here is that they are cutting off their (members') noses to spite their (members') faces.
Yeah, it's the right of the author/artist/inventor to be emphatic that he or she doesn't want any copying at all, but that kind of attitude taken too far tends to cut them off from their potential customers.
My opinion here, and I think I am not alone, is that we should allow the artists/authors/inventors a bit more than their legal right for moral reasons, but that still doesn't alter the fact that you can't sell a work no one knows about. That is their right to paint themselves, individually, into such a corner if they so desire, and it should be, for a realistically limited time.
Those (anti-) artists' associations (and the patent trolls, as well) should not be given any slack, because they are trying to enforce their regime on the whole market (which is now an international market). This is a huge, huge power grab, nothing more, nothing less.
Now, if you want to talk about natural rights, just remember that nothing is created/invented in a vacuum. No one has much
Editions (Score:5, Insightful)
What irks me most about textbooks is the "editions" scam. Every year or two a "new" edition comes out which makes the "old" edition not usable in the current course. The scam is that there is very little difference between the "new" edition and the "old" edition; just enough to change page numbers and a few examples. The worst part is that there is no need for a new calculus book; how much has first year calculus changed in 12 months?
Re:Response from Lulu (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad part is, they didn't bring it to your attention it appears. Good old CmdrTaco and the poster (Albert) thought it'd be more effective to not tell you and sensationalize it a bit here in some sort of attempt to turn this into yet another GPL war.
Bringing it to your attention properly would have simply meant they clicked on the link on your website to report it.
I appreciate you taking the high road here and trying to say thanks, but lets call it what it is, this is a bunk story written for ad clicks by a couple of douche bags trying to get more page views from the angsty slashdot teenagers.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Following your rational a book that sold 2 copies and took the author a year to write would be fairly priced at $37,500...
Re:College Textbook Prices (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:3, Insightful)
And Stephen King novels older than 2 years should be priced at $0.75, the cost of printing+distribution. Because the author only deserves $50,000 a year at most, and the books were paid for by society already.
Re:College Textbook Prices (Score:5, Insightful)
If you would like to see a detailed case study of an experiment into this effect, please look up "America"
Or, you know, you could maybe try traveling to America.
Who'd want to do that?
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes no sense. According to your metric the more it sells the less valuable it is. There is a risk factor there, he could have made little or no money from his book, like many other authors out there. He sells a lot, good for him.
I've been a teacher assistant for Calculus quite a few times. Many if not most professors tend to follow Stewart's book in their course preparation, but the book is not required material for the students by any means. In fact they rarely buy it. Classes are self contained, we provide exercise sheets, and some professors also provide their own notes. That's enough. And if they do want to read the book for free it is available at the library.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:5, Insightful)
You and I define appropriate salary a lot differently I think.
Who the hell are you to tell anyone what they should earn annually? You're happy with less than $75k/year so that's more than enough for anyone?
Re:Yeah.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's too easy anywhere.
You should probably only print your books on photosentive watermarked paper. That way every page that is printed will display a "don't copy that floppy" message when someone tries to scan the page.
Copyright infringement is a real problem everywhere with every medium and it basically comes down to discovering and litigating your issues. If you are not prepared to deal with those issues then perhaps you probably shouldn't.
Seriously, bad people do bad things...
Re:Response from Lulu (Score:3, Insightful)
On the plus side, I am now aware of lulu.com and quite possibly I may use their services in the future...
Re:Extreme Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Your country stole the name, and made you all believe that they came up with it.
That is incorrect, as, having visited other English speaking countries, the rule holds true outside just the USA. It is you who does not understand English and mistakenly applies a Spanish definition to an English word, then pompously assert to many native speakers that they don't know their own language, even when your definition is the one that's wrong.
Why do you think your country is named the united states OF America? Because it is a bunch of states that are within a bigger place called America. That's fucking why.
So The United States of Mexico is named after a larger place called Mexico, and it's wrong to call them Mexicans? Just give it up, you are an idiot.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Selling free copies is absurd (Score:3, Insightful)
Ebook piracy shows no such thing. What is shows is that when your trying to sell something in a market where the cost to copy is nil, then your business model is broken.
When you buy an e-book, you're not paying for the cost to copy. You're paying for the value of the content. Intellectual property does have value.
Artificial scarcity on the internet is simply impossible and at best all you can hope for is to get people to pay for convenience.
The price of a book has nothing to do with scarcity. It's the value of the ideas in the book that create the value. The value of the materials, even for a hardcover book, are negligible in the cost.
Obviously writers can't make money through concerts or t-shirts; but there will always be a market for those of us of enjoy real, physical books. There is also a market for public speakers, many of whom are writers. Does this mean that all writers will be able to make a living? No. However it's neither reasonable nor feasible to allow everyone to make a living doing what they enjoy.
I certainly agree that all writers aren't entitled to make a living doing it, if they can't get people to buy their books. But that doesn't justify stealing. By all means, if you don't think someone's work is worth buying, don't buy it, but then don't read it, either. If it's good enough to read, it's good enough to pay for. The idea that, "If I can figure out a way to steal it, you don't deserve to get paid for it" is, frankly, sociopathic.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. That's all I'm going to say.