Don't buy the IEEE edition of my book | Hacker News Reader

Don't buy the IEEE edition of my book

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121 pointsgeekam33 comments

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.

> 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.

The ACM, at least, allows authors to post copies of articles on their web pages. That's a not totally unreasonable policy (although the ACM Digital Library is pretty well locked down).

I completely agree that IEEE is evil.

Random fact: Peter Suber was my academic advisor in college! Incredibly smart and nice guy.

> The ACM, at least, allows authors to post copies of articles on their web pages. That's a not totally unreasonable policy (although the ACM Digital Library is pretty well locked down).

Does that include valuable stuff that's buried in conference proceedings?

In fairness Peter's book is freely available online too, and sold like normal reasonably so it's not like IEEE are locking it down or anything. Definitely ridiculous pricing though.

>I paid £5 including delivery.

While I agree IEEE is evil, the practice is standard among publishers, or any economic entity. It's called price discrimination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination). The seller usually makes the difference the amount that price arbitrage is unprofitable. The producer (IEEE in this case) often does this to create presence in markets where it would otherwise be uncompetitive: the pricing reflects the cost only of printing and getting the book to the customer. Do we all want to buy books at South Asian prices? YES! Can we: No! That would drive the producers dead right away.

For those who didn't click the link, the classic example of price discrimination is movie tickets. There is one price for adults, and another for children, even though the costs to the cinema are the same either way.

Yes, the ability to separate markets and thereby price discriminate will increase producer profits. Yes, this will sometimes make otherwise unviable products viable. However, this is not always the case. In the case of textbooks, I would suspect that, if producers could not discriminate, they would price at roughly the 'Western' price, and people in low income countries would be unable to afford a licensed copy of these books. Perhaps we would save a small percentage, but not much.

> ... 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.

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 :)

Tesco vs Levi is a useful case when talking about grey market imports:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1261829.stm

Supposed consumer protection laws often feel to be anti-consumer.

Varies by country, I think. In the U.S. this restriction was recently slapped down by the Supreme Court.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Son....

>>big warning not to sell outside those areas stamped on it

I only graduated back in 2011. During sophomore year I found all the international edition textbooks on ebay. US Retail $100+ would often be ~$40 itnernational. Only thing different would that it was in black and white vs color.

Average semester cost of books usually ~$200, if I had paid full price it could easily been $500-$600. The bookstores only give 20-30% back most of the time and heaven forbid if a new edition comes out and the price drops 90% on resell.

My 1967 Calculus 1 by Apostol is going for $125 on Amazon. I kind of expected it to be one of the $.01 variety by now.

I bought it from an upperclassman for $5 or so back in 1975.

It's pretty much the same story for the other college textbooks of mine.

$125? Amazon is showing me $209.

When mine wore out [1], I replaced it with the international edition. Exact same text, but paperback instead of hardback. Around $30 with shipping. Amusingly, I could either have bought from a dealer in India for around $10, with $20 shipping, or from a dealer in the US for around $25 with $5 shipping.

Good sources for international editions of textbooks are abebooks.com an biblio.com.

[1] since I don't actually use calculus much, I tend to forget it. Every few years I get tired of living with the shame, and re-read Apostol (although once I did Spivak for variety).

What in the world?? Is it a collectible now? First edition? lol.

Math is something I'm surprised there's so many editions about. I don't think Calclus 1 has really changed much, so why do we need 10 editions for it? I really do think it's just for the sake of the publisher.

It's a second edition. The preface says it's a significant rewrite. I think that being from the 1960's it was before the practice of making superfluous new editions to drive new sales.

But I do share your questioning the need to constantly write new Calculus textbooks. I often read about complaints about public schools being stuck with "old" textbooks, as if grade school math, science, and history have somehow changed in the last few decades.

I think the "old textbooks" complaint is actually due to the books falling off the binding. I had a physics class where one of the books had the teacher's name in it x_X, and he was near retirement age.

When the recession hit a lot of students asked teachers whether the earlier edition texts were still okay for class. Most of my teachers completely understood the situation students are in financially, one teacher went on a tirade against the school's bookstore.

I've been trying to get a copy of that book but I have trouble finding sellers who will post it to Australia, or where postage < book price.

It's pretty big and heavy so this is probably understandable.

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

IEEE also actively lobbies against any kind of patent reform.

Once I got car insurance (I don't even have a car) offers from the IEEE I made sure I wouldn't renew.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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".

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?

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