Wiley’s removal of hundreds of titles from ebook collections

Wiley is such trash. In college in engineering the prof would assign us workbook problems from the book. I did all of them to stay practiced (and did well in the classes!). Lots of people expressed interest in my answers so they could use them to study. I gave them away, then started selling the answers only, which weren’t provided in the course books, online.

Wiley threatened to sue me for copyright infringement. As a college student the threat of a lawsuit really rattled me, so I paid them a bunch of money to settle it.

How are you as a giant company going to threaten to sue a college student for copyright infringement for something derivative of your books?? To this day I have a strong, visceral negative reaction to Wiley and at least twice in my professional life have dissuaded orgs I’ve worked for from having anything to do with Wiley, so hopefully cost them at least as much as they cost me monetarily.

Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read" sci-fi short story has, unfortunately, aged very well: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

I maintain a small list of content killed by DRM on reddit at r/drmgraveyard . I get some kind of Schadenfreude when reading these types of news. DRM sucks, and I believe society should be enforcing waaaay stronger rules to prevent companies from sticking the "SELL" or "BUY" terms to the crap they currently offer for digital content.

I bought a copy of Dungeon Keeper back in the day when it came out (bough it physically in the store) and I still can play it 25 years later. That is a product SOLD, unlike most of current crap (kudos to GOG and websites that sell .EPUBs)

Some magazines enable you to "buy" digital versions that are only readable with a special app.

LOL, no way am I "buying" that.

The important part:

> We further object to the new model that Wiley is pursuing, which is to sell its books as etextbooks on a subscription model based on class sizes for exorbitant fees. It is a model that is unsustainable, anti-competitive and highly problematic in the use of public funds. It erodes libraries’ rights, is time-consuming to adopt, the pricing is lacking in transparency and there is no predictability about access or prices from year to year.

> The sudden removal of these titles makes ebook collections similarly unpredictable

It's disappointing how much effort some people in our field have devoted to imposing the limitations of paper books on bits, thereby eliminating much of the benefit of ebooks deriving from their digital nature.

It is also disappointing how academic publishers seem to view technology primarily as a means of extracting more money from students and universities.

Governments should legalize format shifting for books.

The libraries could scan textbooks when this happened, and make sure that they have one physical textbook per concurrent reader of the resulting file.

(Of course, they'd only bother if doing so was less onerous than using the publisher's service.)

This is another example of why eBooks cannot be considered anything more than temporary.

I've commented this here before and it's worth repeating again. Any time at all no matter what digital good you're buying (especially movies and ebooks), strip the DRM if at all possible, by any means possible (fuck the laws that prohibit this, they wholeheartedly deserve to be ignored for personal use) and find a way to truly own your work. If a seller claims they sold something to you, it should be yours for as long as you want to keep it with absolutely no bullshit like this making the idea of ownership into an insulting joke forced upon people as if they were idiots.

The sad thing is that many people seem to act like exactly what these companies consider them by actually trusting to never lose access to their archives of "owned" content. Apparently, it's "just convenient". Not so much when you suddenly lose it to corporate shittiness.

These big publishing group having these business models do a great job at convincing me to subscribe to them.

Oh you subscribed to have access to this particular set of books? Oops we removed them, tough luck. I am sure your thousands of dollars were worth it.

And who even owns Wiley?

Wiley tweeted that they warned about the changes back in June 2020.

>We understand the concerns. We notified aggregators in June 2020 of the change in ebook availability and set Aug 31 2022 as a live date to give libraries time to find alternatives. We’re working with customers to provide access options during the transition.

https://twitter.com/WileyGlobal/status/1572619044502765568

full title is "Irish Librarians condemn publisher Wiley’s removal of hundreds of titles from ebook collections" which does not fit into the title.

If you can think of a better title than the one submitted you should email hn and ask them to change it.

This would be impossible with paper. Digitization enables so much business innovation.

The whole model of every type of digital media just being a license to view for some time, never perpetual, is really concerning to me. I've had movies I've "purchased" from Amazon which are no longer visible, for example, and this move by Wiley seems to be exactly the same.

Reminds me of this quote: "You will own nothing, and you will be happy"

I came here thinking this was about the grime rapper Wiley[0] whose music has largely been removed from platforms like Spotify.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiley_(musician)

They should link to libgen.

This is why I torrent everything, and will for the rest of my life.

For the same reason we should be concerned about the digital currencies being researched and developed by countries around the world.

And yet I suspect the money the libraries paid still works for Wiley.

Just use libgen?

That's a pretty long rant to not have any mention of the reasons for which the removal was done, nor to have any mention of what was tried in attempt to find those reasons out.