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."
That sounds legal...
Is that they want $170 for a book on calculus.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Sounds like a good way to get sued.
1. Publish someone else's book on Lulu
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
4. Get sued!
My blog
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?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
>>>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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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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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.
Got Apathy?
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.
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. This is unacceptable, people! Learn to Internet!
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.
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Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. Claiming copyrighted material as your own is a clear violation of our policies and we are pulling down this content from our site right now. If at any time you come across questionable material on our site, please do not hesitate to contact me at jcox@lulu.com.
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?
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?