Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
On page 12 of the Lulu scan, the author discusses the relation of his book to "Calculus: Early Transcendentals" and explains that he is attempting to provide an alternate which exactly follows the topics and formats of the original so that students can us it as a less-costly substitute. I didn't go beyond that so maybe it's a scan, but the author does address the issue.
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 :-)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
My first year, we had a required half credit diversity sensitivity class. The book ($70-80 maybe, it was almost 15 years ago) was about a magazine's worth of reprinted newspaper articles. Printed on campus. I think they laughed at me when I brought it to the book buyback.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
one problem there, and with the parents reasoning... Most text books are NOT paid for by the publishers. The authors (normally professors at a university) write the book while being paid by the university. The university wants their name on the book (just like they want their professors names on research papers) as it helps the university's rankings (you know those rankings everyone bases college choices on even though they say absolutely NOTHING about the quality of the teaching at the schools). I'm sure the author of the calculus book is doing pretty well because of book sales, but I'd be surprised if he gets more than $10-$15 for each book that sells. The publishers however are raking in the money, and the college students are paying for it twice, once when they're paying professors to write the book, and again when the publisher sells the book. Then the publisher does their best to screw over the students even more, by forcing professor(s)s to sign a contract saying they'll make new revisions of the book every 2 or 3 years. Sure in some fields this makes sense, but I don't think there's anything new being taught in calculus today that wasn't in a book from 10-15 years ago (likely more, although some changes are made to keep the book "relevant" with engineering disciplines, etc). The sole purpose of that is to kill the used book market. Professors can no longer teach a class using the old book because new copies aren't available, and students can't sell/use an old copy, as the problem sets are different (normally that is the main thing publishers want changed in a book).
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
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)