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Comment by pling | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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?

>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 :)

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....

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.

>>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.

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