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."
Yeah.... (Score:4, Funny)
That sounds legal...
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: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...
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There's a base level of duplication/piracy/etc that's considered normal and acceptable, printed media tends to raise the bar enough to make it a non-issue (especially on a new novelist situation - and when you're really famous then it's still not a big problem as you'll be pulling in more than ample sales).
The weakpoint that I'm chewing on is the release of eBook versions, it's just so much easier to clone. Of course, the upside is the potential of viral popularity, assuming the work is good. One could th
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For a new writer or artist of any kind, obscurity is a far bigger issue than piracy.
Conversely... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
As a person who's breaking into the book market with your wife's new novel and seeking an eBook option, this is precisely the sort of crap I'm relying on
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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.
You coward.. (Score:2)
Propose a ridiculous answer, then suggest it is the common response?
How about this:
If the content is published without copyright, the license requirements should allow for physical replication, as the original digital version is protected and version controlled.
Life of a hard copy? As long as the information is relevant.
Life of a digital copy? As long as the information is relevant, with the added feature of perpetual evolution.
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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. B
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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.
Ahh, that explains why books with really good ideas are so much more expensive than books with bad ideas.
The only absurd part of this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that they want $170 for a book on calculus.
-Rick
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Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck you, communist. Information wants to be held hostage for money.
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Just be glad in the Newton family never patented calculus so that you'd have to pay a license fee to do your homework.
Yeah, but the Newton family would have to slug it out with the Leibniz family ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz [wikipedia.org] ), who also claimed to be the father of calculus.
Leibniz had a more outrageous hairdo than The B-52s , so I guess he would have won any court battle.
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I didn't do all that well in history class, but I'm fairly sure that Newton died more than 20 years ago.
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Which doesn't stop anyone from using the original concept. Which you may have noticed through the wide availability of no-name pharmaceuticals on the market.
Re:The only absurd part of this... (Score:5, Informative)
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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:The only absurd part of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
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It would be a fair price if it was by Larson and not Stewart!
Larson FTW!
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...
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
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Following your rational a book that sold 2 copies and took the author a year to write would be fairly priced at $37,500...
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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: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: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
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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. M
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?
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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)
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If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. That's all I'm going to say.
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Except that the information is provided in more detail and with more clarity on the internet. The only reason any of the professors at my university use textbooks is for the homework assignments. I've talked to professors from every subject I've taken, and that's continually what they tell me. I pay upwards of $200 per class so they can assign me homework I won't do.
It is not money well spent. It is a joke.
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fair price?
um, the fact that you think $85 for a 600 page text book on calculus is worth it only shows that you either majored in humor or failed economics.
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$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.)
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 :-)
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Even worse is when they tell you they will use an expensive book for 2 or 3 semesters and then change books after the first semester.
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Depends on the college. At many schools, the teachers (even lecturers) choose the books for the class, so even two different people teaching the same class may not use the same book. I've never heard of textbooks being chosen higher than a departmental level.
Or did you mean that only a Regents level position would be able to set textbook policies for enough students to make textbook publishers care?
Copyright infringement, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a good way to get sued.
1. Publish someone else's book on Lulu
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
4. Get sued!
Step 4, revised (Score:2)
4. Get sued!
It's really:
4. Get sued for 3X Profit (copyright infringement bonus points).
Whoever set up that book is about to get whacked, legally speaking. They probably have been moving money into offshore accounts though....
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>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.
Underpants theft, anyone? (Score:2)
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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.
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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
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You still miss the most relevant part of it: ...
6. Retire in disgrace, with $50 Million Severance Package as a punishment.
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Golden parachutes are wonderful, but I doubt they're applicable to the people doing this kind of piracy.
It's more likely that the people doing it will have cash reserves somewhere safe, so when they declare bankruptcy, all of their "assets" will be taken (as applicable by law), and they'll use their cash reserves instead. I've known of plenty of people who hide assets in different ways. For example, when going through a nasty divorce, people have "sold" their cars, houses, etc
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?
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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?
The rights agencies have money and organization.
The writer may have to pursue an infringement on his own if his publisher is unable is unable or unwilling to do s
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.
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
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I agree that North America is much bigger than the USA, but to me it is (from North to South) Canadian/American/Mexican. Given that the USA is the only county in either North or South America that has "America" as part of the country's name, I think it is sufficiently unique.
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That being said, I kinda like USAian. Maybe just USian?
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Your country stole the name, and made you all believe that they came up with it.
That is incorrect, as, havin
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See sense 3: [merriam-webster.com]
Main Entry: 1American
Pronunciation: \-mer--kn, -mr-, -me-r-\
Function: noun
Date: 1568
1 : an American Indian of North America or South America
2 : a native or inhabitant of North America or South America
3 : a citizen of the United States
4 : american english
Sense 4 is a particularly scary development, however.
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lol. yep, it's those damn masons, at it again!
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: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.
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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
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I did this, too, and did quite well in some classes without the book.
I had a professor that required us to buy a book he co-authored but he gave each student that bought a new copy a few bucks, approximately what we would've made in royalties or something. It was a pretty good textbook for the material covered.
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.
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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
Money trumps ethics every time.
If you would like to see a detailed case study of an experiment into this effect, please look up "America"
I actually had one proff who wrote a 400-page humanities textbook for her class, and sold it as a photocopied reader for $25 (to cover the print and binding costs). That was the only time I know of where ethics were maintained in a situation like that.
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At the University Press I worked at, we helped publish an Advanced level Ukrainian language textbook that simply didn't exist for use before she spent 5 years writing it. Book sells for about $60, and it's an actual hardcover textbook, not a photocopy, and it's built for at least 2 years of advanced-level study. I'd say that also qualifies as maintaining ethics.
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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. Only I don't think you're allowed to board a plane while your head is still wedged in your ass.
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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?
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I am a mathematics professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and I published a textbook [wstein.org] that I use in a course I teach. According to Washington State law, any royalties I receive as a result of purchases of my textbook by students in the course must be donated to the university (I tracked student purchases and donated a corresponding amount to UW). Second, I got permission from the publisher (Springer-Verlag) to make a free PDF version of the book available.
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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.
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It's also easy if that professor is an expert in the field, such that his textbook is standard nationwide.
For example, using Ashcroft and Mermin when Mermin is teaching your class.
The best deal is actually when the professor is developing his own textbook and you get a free preprint version (albeit as PDF).
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Author discusses source material in lulu preview (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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Just because he addressed it doesn't actually make it legal though. I hope there's some kind of follow-up on this story saying what, if any, repercussions there are.
This is stupid. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not really outraged by the person who posted the book on Lulu for profit. I'm outraged by the fact that anyone would pay good money for a pirated textbook...especially when you can get it here [thepiratebay.org]. This is unacceptable, people! Learn to Internet!
Cool story bro (Score:2)
Sidenote: Its actually a pretty good calc text. Cheaper would be nice. And the many editions seems like a money grab.
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.
Response from Lulu (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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On the plus side, I am now aware of lulu.com and quite possibly I may use their services in the future...
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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.
If you think so highly of this site, why are you here?
OMFG!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Are you telling me that people can use technology to infringe copyrights?! Why haven't I heard about this before?! How is this even possible?
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?
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Must be the schools that you went to.
The schools/universities that I went to used the same books year after year until they go out of print. In one case, the professor decided that there was no current in-print book which was adequate for the course and successfully managed to get the author's permission to distribute photocopies of the out of print book to his class.
I could have sold all my textbooks to the following year's class but for some subjects, I opted to keep them for myself. I wasn't the first ow
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I got a degree in Spanish along with my main degree, and the bastards would change the quizzes at the end of the chapters! They'd keep the questions and the options the same, but change the order of the options. You can pick up a Spanish document from 500 years ago and it will read the same as Spanish of today.
Hell, you could pick up something written almost a millennium ago, and it would still be readable. And yet, every semester, new fucking edition.
The reason? The "Penn State Bookstore" was really owned
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Excellent scam; fix a few each time so every year there is a different edition and all the classes have to buy a new one. They could fix all the issues but that would mean only two editions rather than ten.
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All it takes is a few page number changes and a few additional questions to throw off the sequence and all assignments will no longer coincide with the book. Being assigned pages 100-200 and every odd question in the assignment section will not work if the editions are even slightly different. If a student can not do the assignments then the book is useless.
The other issue is that when the edition changes one can no longer sell the used book or buy a used book. That $170 book can not be sold for $100 and bo
So the preview pages match (Score:2)
Has anyone actually bought the book and looked at the insides? Perhaps the folks at Lulu were lazy and swiped preview snapshots, but the contents of the actual book aren't directly plagiarized. Also the summary says "appears to be", as in "I didn't actually buy the book and validate my complaint."
I don't know, the evidence doesn't appear to be enough to support the accusation.
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.
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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.
So....it follows the middle management model?
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>>>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.
That would be the case if the author actually received the bulk of the revenue. They get a tiny cut. Almost all of that goes right into the pockets of the fat cats at the publishing company. These text books could cost a fraction of the current cost, and the the author could get twice as much per book, and the publishers would still get their fair share.
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: (Score:2)
Gee...sounds just like music and software piracy. Except without 'the other half' getting distributed.
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What, like taxes? ;-)
I'm not sure what you're looking at... (Score:4, Informative)
I've refreshed to make sure it's not a temporary bug with Lulu that has been fixed. It happens every time.
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If one wants to protest by infringing, it is possible to do so without making a profit along the way. Just upload it to BitTorrent. The moral high ground is shaky enough that way, but if the copyright infringer actually makes money from the violation, it's pretty much indefensible.
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See page 12 of the Lulu preview for an explanation. They aren't trying to hide anything.
Well, considering that the little note was on the 12th image and that the last ten images were of the exact book it claims to replace, that's hard to believe. You'd have to buy the book on Lulu to find out, but either they're selling an illegal digital copy of the book or fooling people into thinking that it's the exact same book when it's just an imitation.
Re: (Score:2)
newspaper are underwear...