

Don't buy the IEEE edition of my book - geekam
https://plus.google.com/+PeterSuber/posts/bpLMka3QC7y

======
pling
This doesn't surprise me. The whole academic publishing side of things is a
royal pile of shit. Glad someone is calling them up on it.

Recently I snagged a copy of "The Art of Electronics" for reference. This has
a retail whack of about £40 here in the UK even with Amazon's smackdown and
second hand value on top of it. Decided screw that and bagged a copy on eBay.
What turned up was an affordable edition destined for Sri Lanka, Pakistan,
India with a big warning not to sell outside those areas stamped on it.

I paid £5 including delivery.

Going back to when I did my EE degree, I paid out £340 on textbooks in one
semester.

Ugh it's pitiful and pisses me right off.

~~~
smnrchrds
> ... with a big warning not to sell outside those areas stamped on it

Can they legally do that? I mean, it seems to be against the first-sale
doctrine to limit what retailers or subsequent buyers of the book can do with
it.

~~~
pling
I think it's mainly aimed at distributors who decide to sell affordable
edition copies to the wrong markets. You can sell it quite happily second-
hand.

I've seen in many books here in the UK, in the front covers usually, a minimum
sale price and a demand that all future sales are credited to the publisher.

They can shove it of course :)

------
bronson
And I thought the IEEE's most irritating feature was shoveling life insurance
scams (& other snailmail spam) at its members every month.

~~~
wwwwwwwwww
IEEE also actively lobbies against any kind of patent reform.

------
mindslight
protip: I've found IEEE Xplore becomes much more reasonable when you hide a
Sparc IPX in the ceiling at MIT.

~~~
serf
it's funny to consider trying to hide one of those bricks

~~~
pling
It's pretty easy to lose one. A company I worked for had a SPARC LX (similar
chassis) as the internal primary DNS server. It stopped working one day and
they couldn't find it. Turns out someone had pulled a cable hard inside the
back of a rack and it had fallen down behind some switches inside the rack.

Lovely machines, until you fire up Oracle 8i's Java front end (the name of
which escapes me). Took 7 minutes to start.

------
p4bl0
Peter Suber's book on Open Access is really great, but I think it lacks
perspectives on the use of the Open Access movement to fight bibliometrics. If
you speak French I recently wrote a detailed introduction to the Open Access
movement which points out the relationship between the two movements and how
Open Access can help to go in the right direction wrt fighting bibliometrics.
It available at
[http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html](http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html).

------
mikevm
I think the only people who access IEEE Xplore are though who have library
subscriptions. Otherwise these per-chapter prices don't make any sense.

~~~
amirmansour
In grad school I once saw $8K+ for an introductory chapter of standards
document. Even if my lab was willing to pay that price, I considered that
price to be unacceptable by any standard. So I instead found the same document
on a public FTP server of some professor in Brazil. The internet is a
wonderful place.

------
NAFV_P
After two years of learning to code I have spent in total about £30 on books.
It would not have been possible without the WWW.

------
DiabloD3
And we yelled at Amazon and Apple for inflated ebook prices. Heh.

------
pbhjpbhj
Why did the author license IEEE to sell the book in the first place if he
didn't want them to use their exploitative pricing model?

~~~
p4bl0
The first sentence of the post is "In January 2013 the IEEE Xplore digital
library began hosting digital copies of 400+ books published by MIT Press". I
don't think he personally agreed to anything, the publishers IEEE and The MIT
Press must have decided to do something with some books which they didn't need
author consent for.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yeah, I saw that too, the trail is still there - he's no fool and, as his book
testifies, knows copyright in depth. You'd think he might stipulate with his
publisher that he had some say in sub-licensing or set some sanity limits on
sales or something?

My guess at the first response to my answer above would be "MIT Press wouldn't
take it on then". But then it becomes a case of "my price for the copyright in
this book allowed MIT Press to do this", which is fine but means that he sold
the license still that enabled this.

Incidentally the economics aren't entirely clear to me. The author says IEEE
charge $15 per chapter. But it's MIT Press's book (effectively), how much are
they getting? How much is the author getting. Is the story here [just]
"authors have bad contracts with their publishers".

It's almost like a malicious joke - "This OA guy wants to sell his book for
$11 and use a CC license, so we're going to sell it for 20-times that just to
screw with him. The kicker, it's not even open access! Lol! That'll teach
him.". You'd think the first line of this guys publishing contract/license
would read "all version of this book, sub-licensed or otherwise must be OA
without exception".

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So, authors have perfect contracts? Or, he shouldn't bother controlling
exploitation of his works? Or, he shouldn't know as a copyright expert how to
deal with such issues? Or, IEEE aren't really acting exploitatively?

All, none? What then?

