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."
College Textbook Prices (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:1, Interesting)
ty! roflol
Re:Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
doesn't prevent copying of his ideas (which is a right given to us by nature).
Wow, you sound like a lawyer. Or you're in marketing. Because you're using twisty little words to say nothing at all.
By your same reasoning, it is my natural right to kill someone. However the law gives that person's family a way to seek "justice" for the death of their loved one?
You know if you read actual copyright laws, it is mentioned somewhere that you need the author's permission in order to copy his work, with the following exceptions... Then it goes on to list the exceptions. Nowhere in the law does it talk about "natural rights" to copy things, or "ways to recover lost earnings". That is for a judge to decide.
Author discusses source material in lulu preview (Score:4, Interesting)
You have no idea what Lulu does. (Score:1, Interesting)
They print out bound versions to order, the LATEST versions, on demand. They print on both sides of the paper, unlike printing from from pdf to your Walmart printer. They are not Amazon, stockpiling legacy books without the latest updates. Authors submit the latest fixes, and when someone orders, Lulu prints the new fresh versions as needed.
For your needs, stick to scouring garage sales and Goodwill for that $5 ratty book. Or spend all that time printing a sloppily scanned pdf on one side of the page using cheap ink on that will degrade within two years. But when you want the latest up to date version that's bound and printed with good quality, use Lulu.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Long after finishing college, the Stewart calculus books are pretty much the only texts that remain on my bookshelf since then. The rest of that list is CS material that still gets referenced.
FWIW my last two real-world jobs have involved doing calculus on whiteboards, which I realize isn't all that common :-)
Re:College Textbook Prices (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in school they'd frequently assign books that were never used in the course. I started saving hundreds of dollars by not buying books until I absolutely needed them.
I think professors let their course change and shift semester after semester, end up stopping using a book but still require it... Meanwhile, the publishers laugh their way to the bank... :P
Re:Yeah.... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a person who's breaking into the book market with my wife's new novel and seeking an eBook option, this is precisely the sort of crap that we're worried about, just all too easy through modern POD portals like Lulu.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:2, Interesting)
...
You and I define fair price a lot differently I think.
How many years did this book take to create? Figure in an appropriate salary, which is certainly less than 75k/year (if you live in some area where thats not a good salary then you need to move, dumbass), and take into account how many copies (copies here, costs them next to nothing to produce after the first one is printed) they've sold at a ridiculous price to students ...
College isn't about an education anymore, its about how much everyone in the business can milk you for, and how many loans they can convince you to take out so they can milk you some more.
The book wouldn't be worth $170 if each copy was hand written by God himself, although I'd probably pay that much for it if you could prove it was God that inked it.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yeah.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, it's frequently the mentality, until they get to the point in their lives where they actually get turfed out of the basement and find they need to make a basic living off their creative works.... then suddenly the see the need to actually make money and protect their investment.
For the last 15 years I've produced OpenSource software (some of which is used extensively for email systems) but I do have my commercial products to ensure the lights stay on and there's food in the cupboards.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, on that note, I remember paying ~110 for this same book new 10 years ago, I guess inflation has been terrorizing the book market.
Phil
Re:Copyright infringement, anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
That could work, but they may (and probably would) use the DMCA "Safe Harbor" clause. Basically "Nope, not us, we only provide a service, we are not responsible for the content". A C&D to Lulu would get rid of the content though, but not guarantee that it won't come back as another user with a bit of modification. If they get in enough hot water from enough publishing houses, they would then have to take more action against it. It's in the best interest of Lulu financially to allow the illegal activity to happen. It's obviously not in the best interest of the authors and copyright holders though.
Plenty of people will make the same arguments that are used against the RIAA and MPAA for piracy of music and movies. Myself, I don't see a huge problem with movie or music piracy. If a person wants to see the movie or hear an album, they'll buy it, rent it, or borrow it from a friend. If they didn't want to pay for it, they've always copied it. If they aren't willing to pay for it, and can't pirate it, they still won't buy. That's been the case since 8 tracks came out for music, and VHS came out for movies.
The big difference here is that there is a discernible loss. With movies or music, the user who is pirating the media would likely not actually purchase it, as I mentioned above. For example, I don't listen to music unless it's on the radio or a friend is playing their CD's or legally downloaded music. In this case, the user not only would, but usually must purchase the book as part of the curriculum, so there is no question of if the user would purchase the book. The answer is definitely "yes". There are other edge cases, but that's not important here (i.e., roommates taking the same course, sharing a book).
Not remotely (Score:1, Interesting)
Scanning the table of contents tells me that, with the exception of the use of graphing calculators and computers, it covers the same material that my high school calculus book did 25 years ago or my mother's college calculus book did 50 years ago.
Why are students being forced to pay exorbitant prices for texts to teach content that hasn't materially changed in a few hundred years?
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Regarding the first part yes agree, he was probably being paid by the Uni. Although to be fair, for anyone that knows how it works, that's almost no different from being paid by the grocery store if that happens to be your job. Meaning that writing the book is pretty much a second job, it's not like they'll cut on your job or expect you to publish less. In any case I still concede you have a point.
The second part I don't get though. I don't see my Uni buying new volumes every couple of years by any means. My own copy is now about 6 years old and that's what I use. Also maybe it's different over there. But like I said, I've never seen students being required to buy the book. Classes should be self contained, and the book just an extra and available for free at the library.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a purchaser of goods, he's in control of what those that sell things make. As in if he doesn't buy something because he doesn't agree with the price, the seller makes less.
Just because something has a price sticker on it doesn't mean they'll get that.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well you see the thing is that the reason why they're earning whatever money they get from royalties is because I, as a citizen of the United States of America, have agreed to temporarily relinquish my right to make copies of their work.
After all, freedom of speech is a right explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment; it doesn't really matter if someone else came up with that speech (or print) first, I theoretically have the right to repeat it as much as I want.
So, being the nice person that I am, I relinquish that right. I agree to temporarily let the copy-right for the work reside solely with the author, so they can make a profit off of it in order to recoup the cost of writing the book, plus some extra profit to encourage other people to widely distribute their works.
Then, after they've had enough time to make a reasonable profit if that work was good enough, I expect to get my rights back. I expect to be able to exercise my free speech rights with regards to that work, with no limit.
So basically yeah. Steven King only makes money due to the forbearance of his readers. If we actually cared, we could set the limit to something like "if it makes more than $75k, it's in the public domain" or whatever.
(as a side note, I will never be able to exercise my free speech rights with regards to any work published in my lifetime - life of the author + 75 years guarantees that I'll be dead by the time it goes free)