Elsevier Store - Over 16000 books DRM free for $1 | Hacker News Reader

Elsevier Store - Over 16000 books DRM free for $1

store.elsevier.com

6 pointsnpalli17 comments

Umm, no. That's not what it said.

They went DRM-free on their books, meaning their collection of 16000 books are now DRM-free.

There is some sale for some books selling for 1$ but absolutely nothing about the entire collection being available for 1$.

This is misleading.

There are 100 books on sale for $1 each

The watermarks in their PDF files are quite ugly: they put "This book has been licensed to XYZ" on the left side of each page. Since those lines are seperate text objects, they are also trivial to remove. For $1 ugly watermarks are okay, but the regular price of many of those ebooks is more than $100. There must be a better way to do this...

Update: the watermarks are actually in their own layers that can be hidden in Evince. Nice, I didn't expect that! On the other hand, the PDFs lack a TOC.

Can anyone link to a single book that has a listed price of $1? On the left-hand side, one can supposedly browse "$1 eBooks by subject", but all of them appear to cost way more than $1.

For the hell of it, I went to the "Mathematics and Statistics" section of these supposed $1 ebooks and added _Information-Theoretic Methods for Estimating of Complicated Probability Distributions_ to my shopping cart, thinking that maybe the discount isn't activated until items are in one's shopping cart. Nope! Not only is the ebook still $200 in my shopping cart, but there's no obvious way to remove the item from my shopping cart.

Add the ONESALE code to your cart and they change to $1.

Ah, that worked. Thanks!

After looking at the shopping cart again, I found the "Delete" link, so I can now clear my shopping cart. However, I don't see a single ebook that's priced anywhere near $1.

bad title, for EU only 100 eBooks for 1 EUR+Tax , not 16000 eBooks : http://store.elsevier.com/coArticle.jsp?pageid=18100024&loca...

-Offer valid until November 5, 2013.

-Limit 10 books per order with this offer.

In the US, it's also only 100 books that are available for $1.

Or you can just go to Project Gutenberg which "offers over 42,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online." http://www.gutenberg.org/

> Or you can just go to Project Gutenberg which "offers over 42,000 free ebooks

I am not sure Elsevier's collection intersects very much with Gutenberg.

What does Project Gutenberg have to do with anything? They offer free books that are in public domain.

Elsevier is selling books that are copy-righted and also recent. They're more about textbooks that are used in schools.

Don't buy the ePub or PDF only versions of books. They do not give you files of either format. They're some weird Adobe DRM that can only be opened in Adobe Digital Editions.

I bought three PDFs and they were normal PDF files with no DRM. High quality, nicely typeset. They work in Evince with no problem. One of them was Low Tech Hacking, which is a fun book that talks about lock picking, social engineering, WiFi exploits, and more.

It's the ones that are listed specifically as just "PDF" or "EPUB" not the ones labeled "Mobi, EPUB, PDF."

I picked up Low Tech Hacking too. :)

This site is bad. You can't order more than 3 ebooks at a time.

Couldn't find any book on programming?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com